Behind The Scenes - Every Podcast Mistake We’ve Made In 85 Episodes

In this episode, Logan sits down with producer Rashad Assir for a deep dive into the journey so far, including all the funny stories, mistakes, and insights from the last 85 episodes of The Logan Bartlett Show. If you’re interested in seeing behind the scenes, or if you’re a creator looking to build something, this episode is for you. We’ll be back to normal programming next week! (0:00) Intro (0:52) How to make a podcast (2:31) The Logan Bartlett Show story (11:07) Different mental milestones (13:55) The crypto era with Zach Weinberg (17:53) Find your niche (22:20) Starting to do interviews (27:14) Importance of consistency (32:09) Describe the Logan Bartlett Show (35:51) Same strategy as working with founders (38:56) Far from a perfect product (41:44) Benefits of YouTube (47:44) Not looking back and agonizing (53:05) Internet comments and feedback Mixed and edited: Justin Hrabovsky Produced: Rashad Assir Executive Producer: Josh Machiz Music: Griff Lawson 🎙 Listen to the show Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-logan-bartlett-show/id1606770839 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5WqBqDb4br3LlyVrdqOYYb?si=3076e6c1b5c94d63&nd=1 Google Podcasts: https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5zaW1wbGVjYXN0LmNvbS9zb0hJZkhWbg 🎥 Subscribe on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCugS0jD5IAdoqzjaNYzns7w?sub_confirmation=1 Follow on Socials 📸 Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/theloganbartlettshow 🐦 Twitter - https://twitter.com/loganbartshow 🎬 Clips on TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@theloganbartlettshow About the Show Logan Bartlett is a Software Investor at Redpoint Ventures - a Silicon Valley-based VC with $6B AUM and investments in Snowflake, DraftKings, Twilio, and Netflix. In each episode, Logan goes behind the scenes with world-class entrepreneurs and investors. If you're interested in the real inside baseball of tech, entrepreneurship, and start-up investing, tune in every Friday for new episodes. Executive Producer: Rashad Assir Producer: Leah Clapper Mixing and editing: Justin Hrabovsky Check out Unsupervised Learning, Redpoint's AI Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@UCUl-s_Vp-Kkk_XVyDylNwLA 🎥 Subscribe on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCugS0jD5IAdoqzjaNYzns7w?sub_confirmation=1 Follow on Socials 📸 Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/theloganbartlettshow 📱 X - https://twitter.com/loganbartshow 🎬 Clips on TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@theloganbartlettshow About the Show Logan Bartlett is a Software Investor at Redpoint Ventures - a Silicon Valley-based VC with $6B AUM and investments in Snowflake, DraftKings, Twilio, and Netflix. In each episode of The Logan Bartlett Show, we sit down with the people behind today’s most important startups and extract the tactics, lessons, and frameworks they’ve learned the hard way. Conversations span hiring to GTM, product, growth, fundraising and everything in between - collectively forming the ultimate playbook to make you a better CEO, investor or board member. Tap follow and enable notifications to stay ahead of the game.

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

• 0:05Logan Bartlett?

  Welcome to the Logan Bartlett Show. On this episode, you're going to hear something a little bit different. Producer Rashad Assir and I talk about the postmortem of the last 85 episodes and what we've learned about podcasting, as well as the mistakes, the infinite mistakes we've made along the way, as well as some funny stories about the journey. Mostly, I fucked up the scheduling of an ex-guest, but I think a lot of these insights are actionable to any creator that is thinking about building something, or if you're just a loyal listener and want our retrospective on how we've gotten to where we are. I think this will be a good episode for you. So, hope you enjoy it here now.

• 0:44Speaker 01

  All right.

• 0:45Logan Bartlett?

  Rashad.

• 0:46Speaker 01

  Logan, this is a non-standard episode. Do you want to give some context as to what we're doing here?

• 0:52Logan Bartlett?

  So, we get asked a bunch about how do you make a podcast? How did all of this come to be? And I think you especially, but me at times as well, have had to have a lot of 30-minute-long chats with people about our lessons learned, and like what we do, and all that stuff. And so, I think we've learned some interesting stuff along the way. And so, we've been talking about doing this for a little while, just like a postmortem on some of the things that we figured out in making the show, and producing content, and building what we've built. And so, some interesting lessons of like the journey, I guess, now that we're 85 episodes in.

• 1:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:31Logan Bartlett?

  And then 25% is, I fucked up scheduling a little bit and didn't have a guest. So, that's the reason for timing here, is we're committed to every Friday morning delivering something to you. So, here we are. It's the two of us talking about this.

• 1:45Speaker 01

  Yeah. It was this or no episode.

• 1:47Logan Bartlett?

  It was this or no episode. So, be appreciative. If you don't enjoy this, which hopefully people will, then you can pick the other path that we didn't take, which is not listening to this episode.

• 1:57Speaker 01

  Totally. Okay. So, in terms of structure, I guess, just to lay out kind of how we'll go through things, I figured it makes sense to kind of start at what the show was originally, how it's transformed. There's been like- Two or three like major transformations in the show. And I feel like each one of those, we've had some big strategic learning that maybe people can.

• 2:19Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, I think probably a small percentage of people at this point were here with us in the early days. Right. It's like, uh, just based on the end of how we've grown, uh, the people that were here in the start were not, uh, probably don't know the path.

• 2:31Speaker 01

  Yeah. So maybe the whole like how this came to be is, is interesting. We originally started as more of a news show. You had two co-hosts that were one founder, operator person and one other VC. It then evolved into just being you. We hosted a series of web three debates and that took up probably 10 to 15 episodes of, over the summer of 2022. And then ultimately, like, how would you describe the show that we've landed at now?

• 2:58Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah. I mean, I think the product now is pretty consistent. We do, uh, interviews, conversations with, uh, important or interesting people in the broader tech ecosystem. It's probably, I don't know, someone can actually look at this, but 80% operators and tactical lessons that they've learned along the way. And 20% investors or other, uh, that and their insights about this stuff. I think our, our goal now in every episode is to have someone that's uniquely interesting, giving a unique perspective on actionable insights that they've gleaned along the way. And I think that product, at least based on the, the subscribers and stuff, it seems like people like that product enough.

• 3:40Logan Bartlett?

  Or at least the people that don't like it, don't tell me that much. Uh, so, so it seems like it's working.

• 3:46Speaker 01

  We'll talk about the people that don't like it and very much do tell you in the comments or whatever, uh, and how mean people can be. But, um, also how nice and great people can be with giving feedback. And I think, yeah. One thing I was thinking about as I was going through our guest list is, uh, I feel like we are very selective in choosing guests that have really like walked the walk.

• 4:07Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 4:08Speaker 01

  Even if they haven't been on a ton of podcasts or don't have the biggest platforms, like that's not really something we pay attention to. Or I don't know, maybe that's something you.

• 4:16Logan Bartlett?

  No, uh, in the early days, I thought like, oh. The number of Twitter followers someone had is a mark of importance and it's just not. It's just making good con. It's almost better if they haven't done stuff before. And that they have interesting lessons that they haven't shared elsewhere is actually a better thing than how big of an audience someone someone has. And so I guess maybe just the genesis of the the show itself was it was 2021 in the fall winter and the market was crazy for VCs. And I was like, hey, we need to do something. I need to do something to stand out more than I have.

• 4:57Logan Bartlett?

  And I've been fucking around on Twitter for a while, but that it was it was interesting, but it was very one dimensional in my personality and it grew. And I think I sort of figured out like how to grow it and it was shitposting and it was jokes and a bunch of things like that. And I wanted to do something different that allowed me to showcase a little bit more of my personality than like 140 or 280 characters or now infinite number of characters would allow. And so I thought I looked at the all in pods success and I was like, oh, well, if younger people in the industry could do that, that seems like clearly there's a market for it. And so that was the only real thought behind it. And so that was, I guess, December of 21.

• 5:42Logan Bartlett?

  I recruited Zach and Nikita to come on and do it. We were friends friendly with with them. And so we did a few test episodes over the course of December into January. And then you came on board and around the time and then we sort of launched the show as a basically a rip off of all in pod with younger people involved.

• 6:06Speaker 01

  Totally. Yeah, I remember we took a bunch of inspiration from how they were running their show. It was a very news focused pod, like we would find the most interesting five to 10 headlines about the week. Some of them would be like serious things like whatever Sequoia announced the fund. But then some of them was like more like Twitter news. Like I remember. There were a lot of like, just like in the Twitter zeitgeist news stories that you guys would talk about. Um, how was that experience?

• 6:36Logan Bartlett?

  Well, it's, it's, it's interesting, right? I think one of the lessons I've learned is, uh, people either wanna be entertained or they wanna be educated. And, uh, I don't think we had that thesis early on. We were just sort of like, oh, this is working. We saw something else that was working and was like, all right, let's put a spin on it. And I think founders probably can often take inspiration from something else and iterate around something. Uh, and so it wasn't more thoughtful than that. It wasn't like, oh, I asked myself what deeply, uh, appeals to me as a person and that I'm really gonna wanna commit to for an extended period of time. It was just kinda like, oh, that works for those guys. Uh, we can do our own.

• 7:14Speaker 01

  It wasn't a lot of market testing.

• 7:16Logan Bartlett?

  No, there was, there was zero.

• 7:17Speaker 01

  How many people did you talk to? I imagine you, you must have talked to some people about like, hey, um, thinking of starting a podcast, what should I do?

• 7:24Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, people, but at the end of the day, the thesis of, hey, all in podcast, but younger people is like, no one's gonna say that's a bad idea. Like, that could still work today. I don't know, someone, someone probably will do that well. And so like, if some, if you get the right formula of people in place, uh, then that could totally work. What I found is that I fucking hated it. I like really, really hated it. I'm not that interesting in my opinions on stuff generally, or like this stuff I know I can go really deep on, but the stuff I don't know, I don't like doing drive-by commentary and hot takes around. And it's just like, if you're gonna give opinions about stuff, I wanted to be really informed and well-versed in it.

• 8:08Logan Bartlett?

  And you can't do that if you're gonna be like effectively a talking head. And so I fucking, I hate it.

• 8:14Speaker 01

  Also, you have a full-time job.

• 8:16Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 8:16Speaker 01

  As did the other two guys.

• 8:18Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 8:18Speaker 01

  That were, uh, you know, even. Equally or less prepared than you were to sort of have these takes.

• 8:24Logan Bartlett?

  Totally, totally. And so just like shooting from the hip on news commentary, you expose yourself to a lot of, you're either not going to be interesting because you're too muted on stuff, or you're not going to be insightful or like have a real perspective on stuff, or people are going to call you a dumbass, right? And like, none of those things I particularly liked. And so, so we did that for, how long? 10 to 12 episodes?

• 8:52Speaker 01

  It was like around 12 episodes.

• 8:54Logan Bartlett?

  12 episodes.

• 8:54Speaker 01

  And that's when you interviewed Keith and that was like.

• 8:57Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah. And then we had, Nikita was starting Gass at the time. And so he had different time commitments he could make to it. And then Zach's firm wanted more oversight of like the review and process and all that stuff. And, and, and so ultimately that, those things came at odds with our ability to put something out consistently. Because you needed people to talk about things that were topical, right? And like those people constrained with time and people that wanted like to review stuff just doesn't lead to publishing quickly.

• 9:32Speaker 01

  The review thing is interesting. It doesn't sound like a huge deal of like, oh, just send it to them. They'll, you know, redline it a little bit. But when you're trying to turn around an episode in one to two days, like the, the operational friction that that adds, the Justin's here sitting off camera, our editor, you know, having to go late nights to just like, get an episode released on Friday consistently. Cause that was our thing. We were like, we're gonna release an episode on Friday. Was a huge thing in the app.

• 9:58Logan Bartlett?

  And especially if like you have three people talking and we all agree and come up with something interesting. And then someone else is like, yeah, I don't know. I don't think so. That's like a, it's hard enough to make a good product. And then it's really hard to make a good product. And then, you know, whatever, be handicapped in some way in what you can say. Our thesis was, I think, one that could work, but for different reasons, none of us particularly could, could do it, right? And it just kind of, it sucked. I really, it gave me so much anxiety. I did not enjoy that.

• 10:32Speaker 01

  Did you consider bailing? Like, I know there's statistics out there about how. Few podcasts make it beyond 10 episodes. Like, were you like about to throw in the towel?

• 10:42Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, what, uh, those, those stats are like, uh,

• 10:46Speaker 01

  It's something crazy.

• 10:47Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, here we have.

• 10:48Speaker 01

  Pull it up. What is it? It's, uh, okay, so 90% of podcasts don't get past episode three. That's 1.8 million people who quit. Of the ones left, 90% will quit after 20, 20, 20 more episodes. Uh, and then to be in the top 1% of podcasts in the world, you'll need to publish 21 episodes.

• 11:07Logan Bartlett?

  So my thought process on it was I set different mental milestones and I was like, all right, uh, I'm going to do four episodes. That was like all I committed to do. And then we collectively agreed to do 12. And then at 12 was really the fork in the road thing. And we had built some muscle memory and infrastructure internally at Redpoint of how to do this. Uh, I, you had come on board. We had started working with Justin. It was like, we were a little committed in some ways to figuring out how to do this. And so I felt some obligation to like, keep pushing on because we started it. And I also just don't like those stats, right?

• 11:49Logan Bartlett?

  I just sort of knew that persisting in some form would lead to something. If, if nothing else, I would learn from it. And so it was, it was a grind. It's still, I mean, it still is a grind, right?

• 12:03Speaker 01

  And the, the market backdrop of this is this is peak. This is pre like market turn.

• 12:10Logan Bartlett?

  This is while the market kind of ish was turning, right? So like we, or I wanted to do something in a point in time in which I wouldn't have had time to do it. And then the market's like slowing down when I actually had time to do it. So it worked out pretty well, uh, then. But yeah, so, so we persisted into it. I looked at the Jimmy Kimmels and the, the David Letterman's and the Jay Leno's and Jon Stewart's and whatever, all those people. And the model they have works pretty well. It's like you do news and topical stuff and then you do interviews and conversations. And people come for the guest, but they stay for the, the current events and the, the news. And that format really works. If you have, either if you're willing to shoot from the hip,

• 12:52Logan Bartlett?

  you're smart enough to do that, or you're willing just to expose yourself to hot takes and stuff, or you have time to do this as your-

• 13:01Speaker 01

  You have an entire writer's room-

• 13:02Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 13:03Speaker 01

  -writing jokes, or you're charismatic like Jimmy Kimmel or-

• 13:06Logan Bartlett?

  Totally, totally. And, and even then, if you go back and listen to like Kimmel talk about his early days, he like says he wasn't good at it, right? And that's someone that's like insanely talented. And, and so that format clearly works. There's a reason people do it. And so I was like, all right, well, we'll just keep doing this. But it was like, I had three jobs. It was, hey, I had to stay up with current events. I had to interview a guest and have, and also book guests. And then I had my actual job as well. And all of those were like different things. And especially the immorality of news cycles and stuff, you couldn't backload a bunch of episodes or something. It was like, you couldn't can them and release them.

• 13:50Speaker 01

  Sometimes we'd record Thursday, and by Saturday, our release day, it would already be dead.

• 13:55Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, exactly. It was like the news cycles were so tight. And it was, it was just a hard product to, to keep going. But we, we kind of evolved for a while, and I couldn't find a co-host to come on and do anything with me. It's really hard just to talk behind a mic by yourself and give opinions and stuff. It's much easier to banter with someone. And so then Weinberg and I, Zach from Flatiron, now Curie Bio, was kind of a lightning rod. He's uniquely talented and a bunch of vectors of, he's just very smart. He doesn't give a fuck. He has a ton of credibility. And he was the one that I kept trying to recruit in, thinking, all right, I can be diplomatic and

• 14:35Logan Bartlett?

  not as interesting, and he can be a lightning rod and very interesting. And it worked really well with him, which led to the, all the crypto stuff as well, where he would just kind of rail on crypto and debate people and all of that. And that was like a, that was lightning in a bottle of, people just loved that. And there's a reason debates, presidential debates, or like, whatever, people yelling at each other and arguing points like they will on All In Podcasts. There's a reason it works well. It's just like high- Entertainment and high education as well because you get to feel out two points. And so that was like a real lightning in a bottle kind of moment.

• 15:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was going back and listening to some of the crypto debates episodes. We had probably 10 or 12 people come battle Zach and these were like very credible people in the crypto world.

• 15:30Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 15:32Speaker 01

  And yeah, those episodes were great. We were still doing news as well and we were having guests on. So what was the major learning from that chapter where we were doing crypto debates? We had evolved from three co-hosts to just you and you were still doing a combination of news, bringing on people you like and crypto debates.

• 15:52Logan Bartlett?

  I would say that they're like the founding principle of what you enjoy doing and having someone, having people committed with you to go do that. I think that's probably true of those entire periods of time. And the crypto debate thing or that debate format, again, it could have worked if Zach could have committed the time to doing it. And I don't know if I would have been happy doing it, but I probably could have.

• 16:16Speaker 01

  You were pretty adamant about like, I remember there were three or four episodes where you were like, this is our last one. Like this is going to be the last crypto debate because I don't want us to just be a crypto debate podcast.

• 16:25Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 16:26Speaker 01

  Or people are screaming at each other.

• 16:27Logan Bartlett?

  And at some point, like clearly the market runs out of that content. And then you become known for something that isn't what your brand was. And so I think the biggest lesson that I learned as we started to do the interviews and stuff, and this is true for any podcast, is you really need to niche down into what it is that you're going to have your product as. And so whenever I talk to someone, you, maybe you're Mark Cuban or you're the Smartless Guys or you're the Strike Force Five, like some of these podcasts that have come out where they're actual celebrities themselves. And they're, they're, they're able to be interesting in their own right and talk and whatever.

• 17:10Logan Bartlett?

  And those people are just supremely gifted and otherwise, one, you're going to have to really work at what it is that you do. And you're going to start out really shitty. It's just like whatever product you pick, you're going to be really bad at early on. And two, You really should be in the top 1% of where you're gonna start and then build concentric rings around that. And so the TAM initially for content should be really small. And that's like really counterintuitive to people. And I made that mistake. I was like, who are the most interesting people that I can get on to interview?

• 17:44Speaker 01

  Right.

• 17:45Logan Bartlett?

  And I'll just get them to tell their story and that will be interesting.

• 17:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:47Logan Bartlett?

  And actually, like no one but their companies or their coworkers or their family really care about their story.

• 17:53Speaker 01

  Even for someone as big as, I mean, we had Mark Cuban on, we had Kara Swisher on, and they were great guests, but did they perform like disproportionately higher than?

• 18:06Logan Bartlett?

  No.

• 18:07Speaker 01

  You know, your average like founder that we bring?

• 18:09Logan Bartlett?

  No. And that's the other thing is people have, if people are like big Kara Swisher fans, they can go hear her, whatever, five times a day or whatever it is, right? And Mark Cuban, you can hear from a lot. And so you, a big lesson of that was not just like go for breadth of like famousness or whatever or notoriety. It's like niche down into the content that you want to deliver to people that is actually uniquely interesting, that you're uniquely able to provide. And I think the mistake I made was just like, oh, I'm gonna chase the people that are the biggest that I can find.

• 18:45Speaker 01

  Who's the biggest name that I can convince?

• 18:47Logan Bartlett?

  Who's the biggest name I can get? And I'll just get them to tell their story. And people don't really care. Like that's, the fact of the matter is like if they're really big, they can hear them other places and get their story other places. And so that was a really interesting learning and mistake. And then also my interests don't align with everyone else's interests. And so if you, if left to my own devices, I would just go pursue some smattering of like B2B software and-

• 19:10Speaker 01

  NCAA.

• 19:11Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. College football coaches. Yeah. I would go just like-

• 19:14Speaker 01

  Like hip hop.

• 19:15Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, exactly. Some hip hop rappers. And like, instead, you need to think about who your core audience is and who gives a shit. And then build out from what they would wanna hear to be educated or entertained around that. And that was something that I didn't even know- Who our core audience was, who we were trying to appeal to, what we were trying to teach them or educate them on. I was just kind of like, oh, founders or other people that like tech stuff, right? And that's, that's not, you can get that from a bunch of different places, from people that are far more entertaining than I am.

• 19:49Speaker 01

  Totally. And we also constrained ourselves.

• 19:51Logan Bartlett?

  You said totally a little too quick after entertaining them. That was supposed to be like a deprecating joke and you're like, yeah, yeah, yeah, fucking loser. Yeah.

• 19:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, the idea of you being entertaining. We constrained ourselves to a caliber of guests too, that was like really high. To your point about the niche thing, like if you find a niche, you know, Lenny was a great example of this with the product stuff, like you don't have to find like mega famous people to talk about that. You just have to talk, talk to people that really know that field.

• 20:19Logan Bartlett?

  I have so much respect for, for Lenny and, and Lex Friedman and Harry Stebbings and these people that started with, like you, you need to start really small. And Lenny was like, the people he get aren't notable in their own right for the most part. There's some that, that are, but there are people that are real practitioners in their domain. And a lot of people care about product and he gets them to give very actionable insights, right? As you expand from there, you can start putting more loops around it and go, I mean, Harry's name of the show is still 20VC, right? But he interviews Scooter Braun or whoever it is, like just different people all the time. And so you can build or, or Lex Friedman used to be the AI podcast and then he has like Kanye West coming on now.

• 20:59Logan Bartlett?

  And so like you can evolve, but you have to have a core foundational base of people. And you have to be, have the answer to the question of why they should give a shit about you versus infinite content out there. There's infinite things they can go watch and you're not competing with, uh, like just the other people in the, the market that you're thinking about. It's like, oh, well, I just need to be better than the other tech podcasts.

• 21:21Speaker 01

  Or all in.

• 21:22Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah. No, you actually need to be better than anyone, anything else anyone can do with their time, right? And so like.

• 21:27Speaker 01

  Binging shows on Netflix, scrolling on TikTok.

• 21:30Logan Bartlett?

  Going to a bar with their friends, like, like going to a movie, watching sports, like you're competing with all of these things. And so your competition, and that's why I don't mind saying this stuff is like, we're not, I want to help. People start their podcasting get going because ultimately there's no market share capture really from from me. I I I am friends and a lot of people have been magnanimous in the in their support of me along the way. The acquired guys have been super helpful. Eric Torreberg has been super helpful. Jason Calacanis has been very magnanimous with me. Harry Stebbings has been very kind, like all these people, I'm sure I'm forgetting a bunch of people that have been helpful along the way. But they've been very nice because we're not at competition really with one another.

• 22:15Logan Bartlett?

  We're competing with TikTok and we're competing with like, you know, whatever, going to a bar with your friends, not each other.

• 22:20Speaker 01

  Within this chapter of we were starting to do interviews, I was going through episodes like 25 to 35. And we did have a few episodes that resemble what we do now. A few of them being Parker Conrad, we had come tell his story and give a bunch of operating lessons that is still today. One of the best.

• 22:42Logan Bartlett?

  I think that feels, I feel like it feels the same product.

• 22:45Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 22:45Logan Bartlett?

  Today, and which was kind of accidental in that it worked out that way. But it ended up being, and the other thing that was interesting with him is I did all this prep. Like I do a ton of prep before these.

• 22:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:56Logan Bartlett?

  Things and I did both those or I did that in person and and I I felt like there was something that people would tell better stories in person. I just felt that and I I didn't have any evidence to support it. But it just, it just really felt like the difference might not be apparent to the listener of like the quality of audio. If you're just listening on Apple Podcasts, you might have no idea.

• 23:20Speaker 01

  The numbers weren't also substantially like validating that in person was.

• 23:24Logan Bartlett?

  I would actually say all of this stuff in the early days was mostly like intuition for the most part. Like had we just listened to the numbers, we would have been a crypto pod, crypto debate podcast and we would be reeling now trying to like pivot and find our own way. So the numbers didn't support spending the effort to be there in person with people. Scheduling, there were, there were all these constraints of I had like. Four different vectors of constraints that that presented themselves. One was the caliber of the guest and so that holding that bar high. One was quality of the conversation. So the ability to to have deep dive conversations with folks and being like, I was well researched in it. One was doing in person versus virtual. And then one was releasing every Friday. And those four things, even still today, are at odds with one another. Right?

• 24:09Logan Bartlett?

  It's like all of those, at some point, it's gonna break. I'm gonna, I just can't do all of those things. And the consistency one is one that I debate, like especially now, I have a wedding coming up and I'm gonna be on a high moon. And will I be able to keep up the consistency thing? For the most part, though, everyone that is successful is fairly consistent. The acquired guys are the ones that is the the exception and they do so much research and go so deep on it. And so I, those things were all at odds with one another. But in the Parker Conrad example, what I found was I knew every interview he had ever done. And somehow in person, which was just an intuition, he told the story of David Sacks and him and Zenefits, which he had never told before. And I assume it was under like some whatever, non-disclosure agreement or something. And I don't know why he decided to tell it there.

• 24:54Logan Bartlett?

  He was, he was comfortable with me and we got going in the conversation.

• 24:57Speaker 01

  I bet he wouldn't, there's no chance he would have told that story virtually.

• 25:00Logan Bartlett?

  Zero percent. If he had been staring into the camera, knowing it was like recording, there's no chance. And similar thing happened with Palmer Lucky when he told the story of getting fired from Facebook. Right? He had never told the story so in depth and all the specifics around it. And I went and read a book about all the stuff before. So I was very well researched when I went into that conversation. And he just went for it. And I know he was under NDA with a lot of stuff. And he was like, ah, well, I, you know, come after me if you choose, I think was his mindset.

• 25:29Speaker 01

  He dealt with enough of, you know, of that.

• 25:32Logan Bartlett?

  Totally.

• 25:32Speaker 01

  He felt probably like comfortable dealing with.

• 25:34Logan Bartlett?

  And so that was an intuition and a learning and something we've mostly stayed consistent to. There's been some times in which we haven't been able to make it work for whatever travel related reasons. But I think that's held true. And even still today, we've had episodes, maybe in the last couple of months in which people said things they definitely shouldn't have and their PR teams came. Back to us like pleading because realizing we were maybe going to make national news.

• 26:00Speaker 01

  We had already clipped it and made it the intro and we had all these animations.

• 26:05Logan Bartlett?

  And the fullness of time. Yeah, there's been, we've had two of those in the last like two or three months of the things that that like the PR teams were very much like, and that's actually an interesting other thing is there's this weird dichotomy of these people, especially those that don't do a lot of interviews. They, they want some type of ability to strike stuff. And I actually like giving them that comfort. Because then they know they're not like, they let loose a little bit in the conversation, knowing they can take it back after the fact. Most people don't take, take us up on that. And then when they do, it's really fucking frustrating because you're sitting there and it's like, oh my gosh, this is so good. And then maybe we'll release, you know, when I, when I'm

• 26:49Logan Bartlett?

  my will, I'll just, I'll just let them rip.

• 26:52Speaker 01

  Lead and see.

• 26:53Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah. Yeah. It's like all the things that are like, what did the national news stories or something, which weirdly we've had a couple of those things come out, but it's very rare stuff gets taken out, but when they do, it's usually to really salacious stuff. So those are like tensions around it. But the, the in-person thing has been really beneficial too. And I think we realized that during that stretch.

• 27:14Speaker 01

  A hundred percent. And the, to your point about consistency, because I've gone back and forth of like, does it really matter? I think it matters for a few reasons. One, it's just like holding yourself accountable to actually doing something. Cause if you give yourself license, like, ah, we'll just release on Sunday. It's a very slippery slope to Sunday becomes Monday to becomes, ah, we'll just skip this week and we'll go next week. Well, maybe we should just do it every other week. And then, uh, all of a sudden like you're not producing nearly as much as you would. And so that's the first point. The second point ties to a broader thing of just like building trust with your audience, which is what this is all about. No one episode is going to make you a huge podcast.

• 27:51Speaker 01

  You might get a banger and it'll get you some new listeners and they'll come along for the ride. But like ultimately you need to be doing something consistently over time very well. And giving your listeners the sort of, uh, the, the. The certainty that like, you know, I have a workout class every Tuesday. I go home, I make dinner, I put on YouTube and my show is gonna be there. And if it's not there, I'm a little disappointed. And so like

• 28:18Logan Bartlett?

  And you go find something else that's gonna fill that spot and you risk. It's interesting, the slope of the line in the graph that we have on the listenership, and I'm going to describe this for people that aren't watching video here. But basically, when, when you start, everyone, you get a ton of like drive by people that are willing to listen because it's like, oh, maybe this is a product for me.

• 28:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:39Logan Bartlett?

  And it turns out like, for the vast majority of them, it's not a product for them. And this is, this is if you launch with a, something of a audience, like I had a big Twitter audience. And so the vast majority of people didn't like the product. They were like, oh, this guy's not as funny as I thought he was. Or something like, he's a little, this is not what I expected, like, you know, make some more jokes. And, and so you get a bunch of churn initially and that continues to happen. People will give you a second shot, a third shot, a fourth shot, or whatever it is, but then you bottom out at some point. And then you start to compound on the way back up. And so the consistency of building that audience of people that listen to you is just really important.

• 29:18Logan Bartlett?

  And what, what they're coming for is delivering it every time and setting the expectations that you're consistently going to deliver that. One of the interesting dichotomies as well is like, you suck when you initially start, you just do. Like, no one's naturally good at any of this stuff. And so when you're, your bias is like, oh, let me get the biggest guests I possibly can as my initial episode. And weirdly, that's kind of a terrible idea because you're going to be at your worst at that point in time. And your audience is going to maybe come in, but then bottom out because they're not going to like you, or they're not going to like the product or whatever it is. And so there's this weird tension of like, how big of a guest do you launch with, keeping them going and incremental, but also you being bad.

• 30:02Logan Bartlett?

  And that's a very weird thing is like, you're at your worst and you're trying to get more people to come on. And so I, I, I think the best podcasts, for the most part, start Out random and then they compound the people like aren't notable people in the industry for whatever reason and then they compound over time as they get better and so by the time most people discover it they've refined how they do things right and so we go look at the people that I buyer like talk to or whatever I mean the acquire guys started out with a very small listenership and just kept compounding over time Patrick O'Shaughnessy same thing Harry Stebbing same thing Lenny like started a newsletter and then to a podcast same thing Lex Friedman same

• 30:45Logan Bartlett?

  thing all these folks started in relative anonymity and this built a good product and got more people to come in and I think that's a interesting sort of thing that you you just need to work through you're not going to be very good initially right I don't know if we still are but we're better than we were so so we kept at that I weirdly kind of times to the rebrand as well for the most part I think by early December we were mostly doing the same product doing standalone single interview releases I think for the most part by November December of last year without a ton of news I don't exactly remember the timeline but then we rebranded

• 31:25Logan Bartlett?

  in January and we've been more or less the same product since then for the most part with a with the occasional exception of like whatever SPF or SPF but SVF too but SVB goes under or whatever like Elon bought Twitter some like topical episodes and stuff which I think we'll continue to do or we don't we don't have a guest booked and we just sort of talk about ourselves

• 31:47Speaker 01

  for a while yeah well this is the first of its kind of maybe the last but we'll see how it does hey guys Rashad here I'm the producer of the Logan Bartlett show and wanted to take a quick second to make an ask we are close to 10,000 subscribers and are trying to get there by the end of the year if you're enjoying this conversation and these episodes please consider subscribing to the YouTube channel now back to the show So how would you describe it? Because we've gone back and forth on trying to create a tagline for the show. And it's some combination of like untold stories of Silicon Valley to, we emphasize a lot of like tactical. You can learn something from this to go apply it to if you are a founder, an operator,

• 32:30Speaker 01

  or even an investor, like there are stories that you can take away from this or things that from a hiring perspective, the best question to ask when you're interviewing executives or how to launch your second product.

• 32:44Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, I don't even know what the right description is. And this is why we don't have a good tagline, obviously, but it's some combination of stories, which are certainly interesting and powerful at times. And then the actionable insights as well. And I think the stories are the entertainment and the insights are the education, right? It's sort of like when you think about that dichotomy.

• 33:03Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 33:04Logan Bartlett?

  And so pulling those things out, everyone has a story to tell, but there's only so many elements of someone's life that is particularly interesting. And so going all storytelling and narrative narrows your TAM a little bit. And then going all actionable insights, I think, can work. And if I had to bias, I would probably bias towards more actionable insights. But I personally enjoy the human side of pulling things out of people as well. And so I don't want to give up on the storytelling thing and elements of that. And so I think the product that I hope people walk away with, both the guest and the listener,

• 33:44Logan Bartlett?

  is something of a definitive account of at that moment in time, that person's journey as well as their learnings. And I don't know what pithy little tagline that ties into, but I think that's the consistent product we've kind of come on. And now we've reached this, there's this funny referential element of like when you, you keep on upleveling your guests, but the guests also want validation from other people coming on. And so there's this funny little flywheel that you just keep building on of like, well, X person went on and X person's important. So like, okay, now, and each person, no one wants to feel like it's the most important podcast they've ever been on. That was actually a funny, I reached out to Naval one time, we were in, or I bumped

• 34:29Logan Bartlett?

  into him in Miami and I asked him and he's like, you know, I went on Rogan, I think it was, and he's like,

• 34:38Logan Bartlett?

  And I never wanted to go on a podcast less important than the one I've been on before. And so I'm never doing another podcast. That's what he said. He's like, I'll do Tim Ferriss because he helped break me in the early days and like make me important. But he's like, I'm not, not doing podcasts anymore. And I was like, interesting. Uh, so if you, if you break that in a ball, you motherfucker, uh, you lied to me. But it's an interesting thing of like, that's a, that's a funny social proof of, uh, just the compounding that people want the validation. We think about that, right? I like, I will, I still do all the outreach today, uh, to guests.

• 35:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:08Logan Bartlett?

  Um, I still do all the prep today. We've tried to outsource that and I just, I don't know, I'm too OCD. At some point, scalably, I might need to more support than I actually do from a research standpoint. Um, but there is a funny thing of how I craft cold emails to, uh, whatever, public company CEOs. Um, and say why they should come on. And I would say half our, maybe half our guests at this point are cold outreach. And half our guests are some referral in and the cold outreach, it's like, okay, well, I know this person probably views that person as a peer or someone that I know will entice them a little bit. And that's like an interesting thing of keeping all this stuff going.

• 35:51Speaker 01

  Is this the same outbounding strategy that you use to get founders to talk to you?

• 35:56Logan Bartlett?

  Hundred percent. Yeah. It's the exact same thing. It's just like, what is?

• 35:59Speaker 01

  I've seen some of your notes and I'm like, this is, yeah, yeah, this is.

• 36:01Logan Bartlett?

  It's like, what can I interestingly and uniquely say to get this person to spend time, uh, doing this? And there's a staging as well of like, uh, waiting for, okay, I'll wait for that episode to release because then the other person will be more inclined to go do it. Right? Then I also think we've, by not screwing over PR teams at times, by doing a ton of research in advance, uh, we, we try to walk away, uh, with the other person feeling like they really enjoyed it. And now I think people recommend it to other people and I get, I get former guests referring in their friends and being like, oh yeah, you should do that.

• 36:42Speaker 01

  I think we've been like, since we've, we, we kind of started doing that naturally. And now we've kind of built that into our brand of like, we want to be. One, one of the most well researched interviews that you're gonna hear. So you can go listen to 15 interviews of Mark Cuban, but like the one that the Logan Bartlett Show does is going to be more in-depth, more nuanced. Like clearly we have done the prep coming in and then also the guest is going to like us coming out of the interview.

• 37:08Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 37:08Speaker 01

  That's an important.

• 37:09Logan Bartlett?

  Certainly a goal. Like you don't want to be confrontational. I could probably count if we've, I don't know how many interviews you've done, 65 or something. I could probably 70. I don't know what the number is, but there aren't many people that walked away, I think, uh, feeling like the, they didn't get what they asked, they signed up for in it. Uh, so I, I think for the most part, I don't like giving questions in advance to people. But if they really want it, uh, you know, it's like, whatever. At the end of the day, I want them to be proud of the product as well, which we found is actually an important thing. The sharing and all that, uh, I think is an interesting, Harry Stebbings originally did a really good job of that of like making sure the guest shared it and then asking other people for questions in advance.

• 37:51Logan Bartlett?

  And then asking those people to share it on the behalf. And there's like, that was definitely something I thought we were above was like asking guests to share the episode.

• 38:00Speaker 01

  So important.

• 38:00Logan Bartlett?

  But it's, it's, that's been an unlock in the last, whatever, uh, six months, nine months of just like leaning into that as well, which is just a little lesson. And it feels like you're above, uh, like, oh, I don't want to plead with my guests to share it or whatever.

• 38:13Speaker 01

  I will happily plead.

• 38:14Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sometimes you plead.

• 38:15Speaker 01

  Because it makes a huge difference and it's like they're sharing it with their audience. So we'll have, you know, Jody Bonzall on, and he has 50,000 LinkedIn followers that have been following him for years because of what a great, you know, executive he is. And then he'll be like, here's an hour and a half of me sharing my operating secrets.

• 38:35Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah. And then you retain X people.

• 38:38Speaker 01

  Of course they're gonna listen to that.

• 38:38Logan Bartlett?

  That's the thing is there's a very natural bounce rate of people, but you retain and compound, right? Over time and the,

• 38:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:45Logan Bartlett?

  The, the N you start with is important, then the consistency of delivering what their expectations are, are important. And then you retain some percentage of them and then that compounds over time, right?

• 38:56Speaker 01

  I want to hit some of these others, sort of like, again, not, we are far from a perfect product. We have room to evolve.

• 39:02Logan Bartlett?

  How embarrassed are we going to be in like a year when we look back on our, this thing and we're like, oh God, this is so, we, we thought we had any insights to share with people?

• 39:11Speaker 01

  It's, it's more framed as mistakes of things that we've completely fucked up so far. But what are, what are some other moments that we've looked at each other and like? Fuck, man. It's episode 58. Why have we not been doing this the whole time? I think some other ones I can think of is is like really leaning into video. We we made it a point to, I think, episode one is on YouTube still. Like, we were releasing a video. And honestly, we may not, we probably shouldn't have released that video on video now.

• 39:41Logan Bartlett?

  Episode one definitely isn't on YouTube, but like episode four or something.

• 39:44Speaker 01

  Or whatever, but like.

• 39:45Logan Bartlett?

  We should take that down.

• 39:45Speaker 01

  We didn't know how to do video at all. We didn't know how to like, we were just treating it as a listening product on YouTube. So I kind of treat like, I think we treat listening and maybe Spotify is just in the middle because they they actually accept video. But then YouTube is its own beast and then listening as its own beast. But with with the listening platforms, there's only so much you can do to get people to listen.

• 40:08Logan Bartlett?

  It's a dumb RSS pipe that if you listen to Apple Podcasts, like there's no the analytics you get back are terrible. There's no like algorithm that's recommending anything.

• 40:17Speaker 01

  You can favorite a show or you can follow a show. I don't even really know.

• 40:20Logan Bartlett?

  You can, but that's it. But but it's not like you, it's very simple and it's all feed based. Like, like, like just an RSS feed. It's a.

• 40:29Speaker 01

  The benefit of that is that like, I think you'll have more recurring listeners or or like once people are, you know, that sort of Tuesday night, I'm gonna listen to it while I go for a run type listener, they're gonna keep coming back to it when.

• 40:42Logan Bartlett?

  And that's definitely the biggest historical market for podcasts. Podcasts, quote unquote, is that, like, Apple Podcasts.

• 40:49Speaker 01

  Right, I'm cooking, put it on and, you know, make my dinner while I learn how to get better at my job.

• 40:55Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, with the thing, shows that call themselves podcasts, the majority of those are consumed on Apple Podcasts for sure. Now, then there's Spotify, which is a little bit in the middle of like, it's more algorithmic. There's recommendations, we get better analytics back from them. You can do video on it, ratings, all that stuff is.

• 41:13Speaker 01

  Chapters.

• 41:13Logan Bartlett?

  Chapters.

• 41:14Speaker 01

  You have some level of interactivity, but for the most part, it's still kind of a dark hole of like, you publish it, like, anyone can go release a podcast, publish it, it'll show up the same as a very well established podcast.

• 41:26Logan Bartlett?

  Yes, and they're getting better at it. They're they're pushing on a lot of the. algorithmic iterations and

• 41:31Speaker 01

  maybe one day they'll figure out discovery, but until then like it's really not worth devoting our attention on those things because all we can do is produce the best podcast listening show that we can and then release it and hope that people go listen to it.

• 41:44Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 41:44Speaker 01

  Now YouTube is where we probably spend, it's not the major, you know, I don't know what percentage of our listenership it actually makes up, but it's certainly where we spend the majority of our time.

• 41:55Logan Bartlett?

  By far the fastest growing.

• 41:56Speaker 01

  And it's the fastest growing and you have the opportunity for like these mega bangers. I don't know what Eliezer did. Probably close to 200,000 views. Like you're just not going to get that on some of these other platforms.

• 42:08Logan Bartlett?

  It goes viral. It like, it quite literally goes like viral within the YouTube algorithm, which is, which is not something like you can't go viral on the Spotify algorithm or you can't go viral on the Apple Podcast algorithm, right? YouTube is its own beast. So

• 42:22Speaker 01

  as much of more of a pain in the ass it is to, it's, it's like, it's like 500% more work to, to do a podcast that has video, but

• 42:33Logan Bartlett?

  the reward is like, I mean, the potential and the number of knobs you can twist on.

• 42:37Speaker 01

  It's more fun. I find it way more fun than like.

• 42:40Logan Bartlett?

  But it's infinite. It's actually, do you hear Mr. Beast talk about this stuff?

• 42:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 42:45Logan Bartlett?

  It's, it's, it's insane. The level of algorithmic sophistication and like content iteration you can do. I mean, our thumbnails, how enticing you make the thumbnails to click on, the intro, how long it takes you to set up a guest, uh, how you, whatever, introduce the person, what kind of context you give in advance versus getting right into the conversation itself. Like there's just so many dials that you can twist on YouTube, not to mention YouTube Shorts, which is his own kind of algorithmic, whatever TikTok clone. There's just descriptions, chapters, uh,

• 43:20Speaker 01

  intros, like how you entice someone to click through and then how you get them engaged in the first minute and then how you retain them. Like we literally have a different video editing treatment for the first 15 minutes because we know that that's the most important time for people.

• 43:35Logan Bartlett?

  And then it compounds, right? And so if you get better click through rates because of the thumbnail and You get better like listener, like less drop off and it shows more people. And so it's, it's just all the effort that you can put into that is rewarded in an algorithmic way. And it's just like, you have to iterate on it and just keep getting better. Each episode, we're like a little better at YouTube and we're still not great at it. You, I, I don't know, would you recommend to someone today to, to start YouTube first? And if you're thinking you want to do a podcast, is this like worth the squeeze of everything?

• 44:16Logan Bartlett?

  Or like first validate that you at least want to do 12 episodes or 20 episodes or 50 episodes? And then go there over time.

• 44:22Speaker 01

  If you don't have the time, if you're, if all of your attention is going on the show itself, I'd say it's better, it's better used there. If you feel like you have a good premise though, and you have a decent show idea, and you have some time to focus on video, then I'd say it's worth uploading.

• 44:37Logan Bartlett?

  It's, it's, and the other thing is YouTube's the only one that has listener and viewer numbers public. Right? And so it's, if you're, if you're starting, it's a delicate balance of like starting and everyone's going to see how many people listen to it unless you're like.

• 44:52Speaker 01

  It's gonna suck.

• 44:53Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah. And so you're going to want to keep improving it and you're rewarded for improving it. But it's a ton of fucking effort to improve it and the amount of iterations and stuff. I think today, if you were to say, let's take out the core product itself, like the stuff that for the most part, my research outreach, whatever, all that stuff. And then the scheduling, we get someone there and we get a product set up and recorded. Everything in post, what percentage of time do you think goes to YouTube versus Spotify and Apple? Spotify and Apple in a bucket together.

• 45:27Speaker 01

  It's gotta be 80 plus.

• 45:30Logan Bartlett?

  That's what I would guess. It's 80% maybe.

• 45:33Speaker 01

  We don't actually do much to the actual episode. Like the conversation that gets had between you and the guest is for the most part what gets published. With the exception of the PR stuff and whatever.

• 45:43Logan Bartlett?

  I would say, and I would say everything that goes into Apple and Spotify benefits YouTube. And so like, that's a base of what an episode. Is and then all the bells and whistles is incremental on top of that and different for YouTube, which has been a very interesting learning. And I guess it's just something that you need to keep working at and getting better. And on an Apple Podcast, making one episode or thumbnail or title better than the prior one, you'll never know if it actually worked. On YouTube, like the click through rate percentage that you can see on the episode is just like it's very incremental from one episode to the next. And so you learn so much more and you can keep improving and optimizing.

• 46:26Speaker 01

  And it's fun to sort of obsess. I mean, sometimes it drives you crazy, but like at least you have some visibility like Spotify. It's like, oh, this episode got X thousand downloads. Like, okay, great. I don't really know what was driving that or what wasn't. On YouTube, you're like, oh, this many people are coming in from a LinkedIn promotional post that we, you can literally see like the inbound traffic. You can see what the click through rate is. You can see how many people YouTube is showing to. And all of those things are very motivating if if you're the sort of operator behind the scenes, like trying to make this thing big.

• 47:00Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 47:01Speaker 01

  Like gives you something to go off of to be like, okay, next week I hope we do better in these different things. And I think that ties to a point of just like, if you are thinking about doing a podcast or doing a podcast and you're, it can be so frustrating at times because you fucked up the intro and it published and you're like, God, that was a really good episode. But it's so important to just like, put that behind you, keep going forward and really just focus on like getting all of the things that you need for a good episode, right? And it's so many things, but like, and none of, none of them individually will make or break an episode, but. You just gotta keep doing them all right.

• 47:44Logan Bartlett?

  I found that like learning, like looking back, but not agonizing over it and looking in the distance, like looking one episode back and learning, but not agonizing and then keeping your eyes on downfield on how many you need to do is the most important psychological thing. And so like every episode, we do a postmortem on like what we did right, what we didn't do right, all that we learn from it. But then it's kind of snap and move on with the exception of the Keith Raboy Miami incident when they fucked up the audio and I still want to, if I, if I see those guys in the street, I.

• 48:18Speaker 01

  I don't think I've ever been so emotionally distraught from something that happened at work as I was with, do you want to tell the story of, well, I mean, the production, we hired a production company in Miami. Like we have our New York guys, we have our SF people because that's most, you know, 90% of the episodes we shoot, but Miami Tech Week, we always do an episode with Keith Raboy. So we had this like local production crew in Miami. I almost want to like link that. No.

• 48:43Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 48:44Speaker 01

  Dox them.

• 48:44Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah. And they just like, they were an audio crew and they just messed up the audio.

• 48:50Speaker 01

  They just fucked up the audio and then we're just like very unapologetic about it after the fact. And they were like, yeah, no, we, we mentioned it to Logan, like midway through the interview. Like we asked him to, to, to re-record. It's like, motherfucker, we're not going to re-record 45, like Keith Raboy has 90 minutes to record with us. Like this is very important time.

• 49:09Logan Bartlett?

  And like you, you have one job. It's just like.

• 49:11Speaker 01

  Yeah. Just monitor the fucking camera.

• 49:13Logan Bartlett?

  It's like, tell us that it's good to go. Right? Uh, gosh. So with the exception of that, that still, it still pisses me off. Uh, I think everything else is kind of like snap and move on after you do the postmortem, but keeping your eyes downfield on, uh, like get incrementally better each episode, but keeping your eyes, I committed to, I said, four episodes and 12 episodes. And I think it was six months, then 12 months, then another year. And so January 31st or whatever of this year, we'll sign up mentally. There's no like obligation. We don't have any advertisers or anything, but there's, we're going to sign up for another season presumably, and that will be another year and we'll see if we want to.

• 49:52Logan Bartlett?

  Keep doing it, but psychologically, just the commitment to keep going is is helpful and not to agonize too much about the past. The other interesting thing from an interview converse like standpoint, and I think I can probably speak to that best. Although we obviously tried other formats is your inclination is to tell a story kind of linearly in a way of like, okay, give me your background and where you went from there. And I I've found that jumping around. And we don't really reorder the episode in terms of how it happens, but sometimes we've pulled forward.

• 50:30Logan Bartlett?

  A segment of the conversation, right? Just we feel like it's appealing and we'll reorder. Your first 20 minutes matters more than your last 20 minutes. More people are listening, so we want to. And and like if they're if they've stuck with you for an hour, right? They'll stick with you most likely for another 15 minutes. Versus the chances that they don't make it past the 10th minute. If the content isn't interesting is is decently high. But asking questions in a way upfront that makes people feel comfortable. But then also be willing to dive into the meat of like what you want to get to is an interesting, just like tactical thing. And so one of the things that I do when I get together, most of these people at this point I've never met before.

• 51:14Logan Bartlett?

  And we maybe we've interacted on email a little bit and maybe had good banter or maybe I got passed off to a period PR team pretty quickly. But getting like 10 minutes ideally with them, just riffing initially, making them feel a little comfortable. And even when we start recording, the first like five minutes or something, talking to them in a way that allows them to warm up a little bit rather than if you if you went to the gut of the conversation that you wanted to really ask about initially. Their guard's definitely up a little bit more. And so I found the longer I spend with people in advance, the more I kind of am able to warm them up if they get their 15 minutes early.

• 51:55Logan Bartlett?

  Generally, I know that we'll have a great discussion. I've tried to do some prep calls before with people. To like get them on and say, these people are so busy and it feels it's probably worthwhile. Maybe that'll be something in a year that I'll look back on.

• 52:11Speaker 01

  As we have grown, we've earned the license to ask for more from our guests. We used to do one hour, now we do two hours and that can be one thing that we ask for in the future.

• 52:19Logan Bartlett?

  But that's decently onerous, actually, of people is we're asking at least two hours from all of these people. And with the most part, we get that and these are very busy, important people in the world.

• 52:35Speaker 01

  Hourly rate on.

• 52:35Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, the per hour rate.

• 52:37Speaker 01

  Daniel X.

• 52:37Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, yeah, not worth fucking up their audio. Yeah. So, uh, so I think that's been something that we've been able to do with time. And I think when you look at Lex Friedman or Joe Rogan or some of those, like they've gotten longer because they've earned the right to be longer with the guest. The guest is going to come in and sit there and really go through all the different stuff in their career. And I feel like we've gotten more to a point that not only has our guest quality gotten better, but their willingness to dedicate the time to doing it has gotten a lot better too. So.

• 53:06Speaker 01

  Do you want to talk about, uh, people are mean and, uh, how you've maybe balanced, like taking the feedback we get in the comments on YouTube, some of it we've actually liked because it can be mean and true.

• 53:20Logan Bartlett?

  Oh, totally. I think actually, I actually think every, every episode has a fair thing to criticize. And, uh, and, uh, stylistically, there's a lot of things that you can criticize me for that I, uh, I want to be better at.

• 53:37Speaker 01

  The question asking thing is like the most recent one where I think.

• 53:40Logan Bartlett?

  Totally. I'm like, in my effort to make people feel comfortable, at times I can be a little circular in my question asking and I've gotten better at it, but someone called it out one time. I don't know if we want to tell people this because now they'll be listening to like, uh, hear me ask, uh, ask, you know, random questions and stuff, but, uh, but someone was calling, they're like, just get to the fucking question already. And I'm like, ah, good feedback.

• 54:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, you hurt my feelings, but that's true.

• 54:07Logan Bartlett?

  They're like, this guy spends more time building up to a question than asking it or something. And I'm like, ah.

• 54:12Speaker 01

  Actually put him up to that.

• 54:13Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, exactly. Paid him, paid him to do it. But it is a funny balance of like, that feedback is definitely true. My energy is to get people more comfortable. And so I don't go to the crux of the question initially, sometimes, which can definitely be.

• 54:29Speaker 01

  And it's easy to look at that comment and be like, have the attitude of like, well, you fucking interview, you know, whoever. Or like, you know, you don't understand. It's really, it's tough. Like you're, you're high stakes conversation.

• 54:41Logan Bartlett?

  And then you're yelling at an anon Twitter or like YouTube reply person. Yeah.

• 54:45Speaker 01

  But it's important to take that stuff in and we.

• 54:47Logan Bartlett?

  No, I actually love.

• 54:47Speaker 01

  You're actually very accessible. This is something people, if you're, you made it this far, should know is like, you are very accessible. On Twitter, I think you respond a lot on email, like YouTube comments.

• 54:59Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, I think every nice comment I've ever gotten, I've tried to respond to in some way. Uh, in whatever format that that is, uh, and that's gotten harder as it's gotten whatever bigger. But, but I think that's really important in the feedback people give or when people reach out and say stuff. I internalize it for good and for bad, right? And so when, when people are, I don't read all the TikTok comments, I guess, to be fair. That's an example of, uh, that's a black vortex of, of Gen Z people, uh, very upset with, uh, with mostly not me. Mostly the guests, but going down the rabbit hole of TikTok comments is like a really funny thing.

• 55:38Speaker 01

  The most common thread, I would say on the, the people getting like the rage on TikTok is usually a more tenured CEO talking about like, hey, I expect my employees to like work hard. And people in the comments are just like, well, it's not fucking fair.

• 55:59Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah. It's like, oh, typical patriarchal society mindset capitalism. It's like trying to, you know, whatever. If you'll just like flip out anything, it's when someone.

• 56:09Speaker 01

  Remote work is.

• 56:10Logan Bartlett?

  Remote work. That's my favorite. When a CEO, uh, people have stopped sort of taking, uh, bait on, on that. Cause I think it's sort of, uh, settled out a little bit when it was up in the air, a little bit of how things were going to evolve. If you asked someone and they were like, yeah, you know, I think we want our people coming in person. Just TikTok, the Gen Z TikTok people will get so fucking mad about like typical boomer mindset. Wanting us to show up to work and be employed, you know, it's like.

• 56:39Logan Bartlett?

  That is a funny example, but to your point on the comments, yeah, I, I mean, that is an interesting thing. If you're going to do this, and especially if you're going to do what our original product was, which is commentary and opinions and all that stuff like. Just be prepared for people to be upset and disagree where if you have one opinion. The, the internet will find the people with the other opinions to, to argue with you about it and. And so that's something you, you do need to have even as benign and innocuous as like, oh, interviewing tech executives. Or an investor's about their career and their operate like, that's a pretty benign.

• 57:20Logan Bartlett?

  Concept, but still people find stuff to be outraged about or criticize you for. Now, the good side of it is, I think for the most part, our listeners, at least the ones that I've, I've interacted with are all. Very respectful and thoughtful and, and considerate.

• 57:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. People that gravitate towards this type of content tend to be people that agree with that sentiment in general.

• 57:44Logan Bartlett?

  Yes, I have a friend that does a sports podcast and, and it's, it's really big. And it's under the bar stool umbrella and like. The stuff he gets said back, he'll be like, oh, you know, whatever, the Giants sucked yesterday. And his comments are like from Giants fans being like, you know what, you suck and you're whatever. It's like, your parents don't love you and like, it's probably because you were adopted as a child or something. And it's like, where did, all he said was the football team was bad. And so thankfully it's not quite that level, but you'll still get it. No matter what content you put out there, you'll get people criticizing, which I think is a feature, not a bug of this.

• 58:24Logan Bartlett?

  If people are willing to invest the time with you, inevitably like to have a hundred thousand people listen. To have a hundred thousand people. Listen, if you have a 90% approval rating, that means 10,000 people are gonna dislike you in some way, which is that's just a feature of all of large numbers and 10,000 people saying mean stuff to you can be pretty mean. And if you ever want to be like entertained with that, go to any big podcast or whatever, reality show, I'm sure is Reddit sub forum or something, or go to the YouTube comments or go to their TikTok page and just read the comments from people that presumably even liked the show enough to subscribe to the Reddit forum or something.

• 59:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:08Logan Bartlett?

  And they are just like brutal to the, to the people at all times, right? And so it's just, it's something you gotta know going in, especially if you're gonna have some level of success. I also think that's an important other thing is what is success for you? Is an interesting thing to ask yourself going into it. Because it can be insatiable of just pursuing the next rung in the ladder of, well, you just want the numbers to go up, right? And to keep bigger, keep growing and be better than before. And at some point, you need to acknowledge what success actually looks like and what you want it to be and who you want to emulate and also when to quit if it's not working, right?

• 59:52Speaker 01

  And Or if you hate your life.

• 59:55Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, well, which, which could be not working. Like if it's not working, it could be you're miserable with it, right? And finding something that actually resonates with you because it, it is a grind. We said it earlier, but it's 100% like the amount of work, I think next week we have right now, I think it's four separate episodes, two hours each. Normally, obviously, number wise, I don't have all those stacked in together, but just the way the scheduling kind of worked out.

• 1:00:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:23Logan Bartlett?

  And I'm very underprepared for it and I need to sit down and do a ton of research and I'm gonna do it over the weekend and spend my whole weekend just kind of listening to other podcasts or reading news articles or just sort of thinking or reaching out to people to ask questions that I should ask and you need to uniquely enjoy it and also recognize that the journey, no single episode will ever feel

• 1:00:52Logan Bartlett?

  Filling and the it's like, oh yeah, if I just get XYZ guessed, it's like, no, the second that episode's published and you get the gratification of it being out there, it's on to the next one. And so I think acknowledging that if you don't enjoy the journey, there's no milestone at the end that you're gonna get to that's gonna feel like, oh yeah, once you hit whatever 10,000 subscribers, it's like so much better. It's, you know, it's not. It's like, it's just the same. It's the numbers are a little bigger and there's more people saying nice stuff and more people saying mean stuff and like that's maybe you get better guests on, but the the process is no different than than what it was before.

• 1:01:30Speaker 01

  Well, hopefully this has been some combination of entertaining, educational to our guests. Probably a good opportunity to just thank people that have tuned in and listened to the show. It's grown pretty significantly, especially as we've sort of figured out based on feedback, what what's worked and what we've enjoyed.

• 1:01:53Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, yeah, no, it's been, it's been a really fun. I mean, any of the, the one, any of the lessons, I guess, that we have here or postmortem or retrospective with a caveat that I still think we don't know. We know some things, at least the mistakes we've made, but we still don't know. We don't have it figured out. Like, we're not, we're certainly not the, the, you know, the top charting podcasts in the world or whatever. These are just sort of our own anecdotes, which is, I guess, a good plug to please share with your friends. So we are the top performing podcast in the world. But, but I think, yeah, this is, it's been, it's been gratifying doing this and the people we've met along

• 1:02:34Logan Bartlett?

  the way, both on the listener's side as well as the guest's side. It's just been, it's been a fun experience. And I think I'm much better as an investor. Interestingly, I got asked the question now of like, why I keep doing it by by guests that we're gonna have on at some point in the next couple of weeks. He was like, why, why are you, why do you do this? I was like, I kind of, I just enjoy it and I think it makes me a better board member to the companies I work with, both because of the network I've been able to build around it and also the insights. It's one thing to like, go learn for the sake of learning. It's another thing to learn to study for an interview with someone.

• 1:03:15Speaker 01

  Right. Cause you're about to put on a show in front of thousands of guests. Like you're, you're not going to want to look stupid. So you are going to do the, you know, read every book that.

• 1:03:25Logan Bartlett?

  You're going to take notes in a way that goes above and beyond what you would do otherwise. And so I, I am really appreciative of everyone kind of allowing this to exist because I am, I think better at my job in a meaningful way as a, as a resource for founders, both because of the network I've been able to build as well as the lessons I've learned along the way. So it's been super fun. So thank you everyone for, for the journey and yeah, we'll see. I promise there, there won't be any more naval gazing, gazing episodes here for a little while and we'll, we'll get back to your regular scheduled programming by, by next week. But yeah, just thank you, Devron, for, for coming along the way.