All-In Live from Austin: Colin and Samir, Chris Williamson, and Bryan Johnson

Hey, everybody. Welcome to Austin. Welcome, everybody. That's my friend, David Friedberg.

Thanks for having me. How are you doing, brother? Welcome to Texas.

It's a little light; we're missing a couple of friends here tonight. We have some new friends and some awesome friends, and we wanted to do something around this new-media creator economy. It's something we're experiencing with the podcast, and it's obviously having a big impact on society. A lot of people say this was the podcast election.

The big media companies, from journalism and Fox News to CNN, and the big platforms—Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, Disney, and others—are rearranging their pawns on the chessboard in response to what's going on. We thought it would be really interesting to hear from some of the people we think are probably the smartest in the creator economy about building a business, maneuvering, playing, and growing as part of that conversation.

You had a Twitter account when we started All-In, but you had literally never tweeted. Now you've become the Sultan of Science. Are there any Sultan of Science fans out there?

Did anybody see him win Celebrity Jeopardy? We’re so proud of our bestie. You have no idea how anxious and ashamed, and how much he was wringing his hands, for 6 weeks. He knew he won, but he wouldn't tell us the outcome because he knew that Chamath would gamble on it and there would be a whole controversy. He'd figure out a way to make a bet on it.

Someone doesn't know how to keep his mouth shut.

Yeah, yeah, that's right. I keep talking to Chamath about that. I don't mind when Chamath says inappropriate things because it usually doesn't involve other people. It's you where you kind of cross the line a little bit, but that's why they tune in. I have to save you from you.

What has it been like? We're going to talk about this here. A lot of people are now taking the playbook of creating an audience and then building companies. You were doing The Production Board and building a bunch of different companies. Ohalo became very successful, and you said, "Hey, wait, I’ve got to go all in on this," so to speak.

But you're going into it with a certain amount of audience, a certain amount of notoriety, and the ability—let's face it, a lot of people in business know you from the podcast. What's it been like being a CEO now and having the podcast as a platform?

That's actually a great question. I'm not doing this podcast to build a media thing. I just thought it would be interesting. We started doing it during COVID, and I just kept doing it. I don't know why I kept doing it, to be honest. I tried to quit every week.

There was still so much tension the first 2 years, until we got up to signing an LLC agreement. Now it's all smooth sailing. The votes are what mattered. It was a big evolution.

The one thing I learned in media from Engadget—I asked Peter Rojas, whom I had stolen from Gizmodo, Nick Denton's company, to come to Engadget—was, "Tell me the secret of why Gizmodo, Gawker, and now Engadget are doing so well." He said, "The secret to blogging is very simple: show up every day."

Jason did keep us showing up, and then it became a thing. It was like, "Okay, we should probably do something legitimate to make this into a business, or make it into something structural that stays alive." So we did.

To answer your question, I meet with farmers and business executives in the agriculture industry a lot. I can't tell you how often I run into someone who's like, "I watch your podcast. I'm a fan." It's Farmer Joe. The other day, I was in a meeting—I won't reveal too much, but it was some big farming company that nobody in this room would have heard of. We did this big pitch, and then the guy pulled me aside in the hallway, gave me a fist bump, and said, "Love the pod."

It is weird. Then I'm in another state at a meeting, and the COO comes out and says, "Dude, I'm a big fan of the pod." It helps with building trust. You've earned a reputation, so when I go into meetings, people know me because of this podcast. That reduces friction. I don't have to go sell myself in a meeting; I'm already sold.

It makes business easier. For me, the pod isn't about making money on the pod as much as it is about helping me in my everyday work, which is where I spend pretty much all my time, except for a couple of hours a week here.

To contextualize that in the conversation we're going to have today: You create an audience with your content. What do you do with that audience? You can sell ads and make money against that audience. You can get sponsors that speak to quality products that you endorse, and you can make more money. You can either get paid cash or get some equity.

You can build your own product, actually own it, own all the equity, and participate in the upside as you sell your audience your product. In other cases, you're building credibility, which is what a lot of venture capitalists did after our show became big. They realized they had an opportunity to build credibility with entrepreneurs, so when an entrepreneur shows up, they say, "I want to work with you because I've seen you on your podcast." Investors show up and say, "I want to invest with you because I've seen your comments on your podcast."

There are a lot of ways to think about the value of this. Building an audience and building credibility is really beneficial, and it can work out in a lot of ways.

David, you take it seriously. It's an investment in time for you. Today we've recorded a great episode. We had our first comedian on, Andrew Schulz, and that'll come out tomorrow. He was hilarious.

You had an emotional moment on the show today. We were talking about entrepreneurship and your journey, and I’ve got to give you a lot of credit. You're not a professional broadcaster or whatever, but you prepare and put it all out there. I'm very proud of the work you've done and how you've evolved as a broadcaster and as somebody on the pod. I'm very proud of how much you've started to put out there of yourself, and it's not easy to do because you're an introverted person.

I mean, on MDMA, I'm ready to go party. I don't know what you're talking about. You're the one who locked yourself up in the room after—maybe back in the '90s, when you were going to raves and had a little of the MDMA, you were different.

I'm saying that now you're a little bit different. It's hilarious because you're such a perfectionist. Every time the pod comes out, Chamath and I just wait 60 minutes after the pod: "That sucked. Producer Nick sucked. We should delete it. Cancel it. It's the worst episode ever."

Then the stats come out: "Oh, we broke another record. It's number 8 in the world." And you're like, "Okay."

The reality is, we can always do better. I am such an optimist, as some of my friends here know. I just say, "That was fucking great. It was a train wreck, but for me it was a great train wreck."

We couldn't do it without the audience and the love you give us. It's such an amazing motivation, especially for me. I feed off the energy. When you tell me your favorite episode or a great moment, or you email us about something, the thing I'm probably most proud of now is that people are telling me they're having more difficult conversations with their friends while remaining friends.

I think that's one of the most beautiful things for me, and my motivation on the pod is really to help give an example of how you can have a hardcore discussion, learn from each other, and appreciate each other. I hope you take that back to your poker games, dinners, and families.

It's a very divided country right now. There are a lot of important issues, but friendship is worth investing in. I just want to give you that as a note: invest in your friends and invest in those hard conversations. Your life will become so rich because of it. Have a couple of laughs, and don't take it all so seriously.

Before we bring our friends out, Colin and Samir, I'm going to quickly thank our sponsors. We don't do sponsors or ads on the show, but for live events we don't want to pay out of pocket, so we have sponsors. Gemini stepped up this week to help us put this event and the after-party on. Gemini is a global cryptocurrency exchange available in all 50 states with a focus on security. You can buy and sell Bitcoin plus 70 other cryptocurrencies. Gemini is offering new users $50 in Bitcoin when they sign up with the code All-In. Function Health has negotiated a special deal for users today: access to over 100 lab tests. You can sign up at FunctionHealth.com/allin100 to get $100 in credit. And Tru Niagen, an NAD+ booster—I take it—thank you again for the great product. Those are the sponsors; they help pay for this. Let's give it up to the sponsors one time.

Let's bring out our first guests, Colin and Samir. They run the Colin and Samir Show, and they're experts on building content businesses. Come on out, Colin. Come on out, Samir. Welcome. You get the couch. Come sit on the couch here.

You guys are like real creators. Brand deal—look at that brand deal. Thanks for being here. We wanted to talk to you guys a little bit about the evolution in media. I want to talk a little bit about the migration and the creator economy. Tell me if I'm off on this, but it felt like people were putting out more short-form content. It was almost like a new type of media that was different from traditional long-form media—TikTok-type content.

But then what happened? People started doing podcasts, and the content started to eat into other forms of media. It started to eat up journalism and news media, and now the platforms are doing deals with independent creators to put out long-form content. Can you talk a little bit about the evolution from short-form to long-form?

I don't think you can underscore the importance of the YouTube app on TVs. The fact that there was now a free option meant that people who were in a setting where they wanted to sit and consume something for a longer period of time could do that.

As creators started putting out longer videos, they started serving more ads, making more money, investing back in their channels and shows, and producing things consistently. Now they can make things better, elevate them, and make them longer. That's what you're seeing now. About 50% of our watch time is on connected TV, so the reach has grown because of YouTube on TV.

Yes, specifically YouTube. When you buy a new TV—when I moved to the ranch, I got a new TV—it has YouTube on the remote. Just think about that as a concept. Then I watch my daughters' behavior, and they're watching YouTube on the giant television, not on their iPads. It's really a major difference.

I'd like you to get into the algorithm versus subscribers. I grew up in a subscriber world, where I thought, "Okay, I'm going to get one more subscriber, and then I'll have them." Out of 10 subscribers, maybe I'll keep 5, but they're going to watch every episode.

Now there's something that's changed. People are creating content not with the intent of getting subscribers, but with the intent of getting picked up by an algorithm and getting nonsubscriber viewers. There seems to be some tension there.

The biggest and most successful creators largely have a 70% viewership base that isn't subscribed to them. I would say that's pretty common among our friend group and among the people we work with.

A lot of that has to do with the algorithm shifting toward viewer satisfaction. YouTube is a recommendations algorithm. When we first started making YouTube videos, if you could make a great thumbnail, people would click on it. That inevitably led to clickbait, where you would click into a video that was really short and not representative of what was in the thumbnail.

So YouTube shifted its algorithm to what is called viewer satisfaction. That's essentially gauged by click-through rate—did they click on the video?—and average view duration: how long did they watch, and what percentage of the video did they watch? There are other engagement metrics, too. Did they like the video? Did they comment on it? There are a lot of different ways to understand satisfaction.

Essentially, every YouTube creator is trying to figure out what video you're watching before you watch theirs. They want you to click on their video after you're done with that video, or maybe in the middle of it. Most traffic on YouTube comes from suggested videos.

You have the suggested videos along here. Are you telling me people are creating videos with the intention of hijacking a popular video and trying to get suggested? Everybody's talking about the latest thing Trump did, or who's on Joe Rogan, or what MrBeast did, so I try to get one of those slots related to the latest MrBeast video.

I wouldn't say it's necessarily about being timely, because YouTube operates as a catalog. Some of our videos that are still picking up viewership today were made 4 years ago. The best way to do it is to build a catalog that accrues viewership over time.

You're mainly looking at subject matter with high total addressable markets on YouTube. When the world of MrBeast really exploded on YouTube, a lot of people started talking about MrBeast or reacting to MrBeast, because there were 200 million people to tap into who were probably watching a MrBeast video.

This is fascinating, because right now there are people doing after-All-In videos where they talk about us and drag us a bit, and they're doing phenomenally well, too.

I wouldn't call it phenomenally well. There are a couple hundred views, whatever. It could be the best in that category.

You could own that category. Own that category.

You guys think about the moments after a show happens. Friedberg and I talk about the moments. Friedberg has that other brain where he's talking about the metrics, wondering about the wait time, and asking who liked it and who disliked it. I'm like, "I don't give a fuck about that." There was a funny moment, there was this moment people laughed, or there was this moment that had emotional resonance.

Can you talk a little bit about art versus commerce, and art versus the algorithm?

It's difficult to create right now within a vacuum. Even if you open up TikTok, the first couple of TikToks you see are going to show you what works. It's hard to create something now when I know what works and I know what people will see, if the objective is audience growth.

A true artist doesn't necessarily care whether anyone watches their work. If one person loves my work, that's all that matters. But a true artist also doesn't always know what they could do to get people to watch their work. We immediately know what would work.

You find that a lot of creators are on 2 ends of the spectrum: they're either an artist or they're a distributor. But to be an impactful creator, you actually need to lean more toward being a distributor. You need to be like a programming executive who says, "Spider-Man worked. Let's do it again. Let's do it again. Let's do it again."

We see that a lot. If we change the title of the show or the order of the topics, we debate it a lot. This might be the thing I want to talk about, but no one wants Science Corner up front because then the audience won't click.

I mean, that's the media business. More Trump gets more attention.

There's enough Trump. This is the tension we've had. We're a band, not a solo performer, so you have 4 people with distinct perspectives. Sacks was always of the mind, "What's the top story in the world?" Friedberg is like, "What's the biggest breakthrough?" And I'm trying to think about the most interesting discussion. Then Chamath is like, "What am I wearing? How does it look? What did I consume this week?" Everybody has different things.

It's kind of disheartening to me to know about all this. I feel like it's ruining it to a certain extent.

There is tension between creativity and strategy on these platforms, because these are businesses. If you zoom out and ask how media businesses work, this is how media businesses work.

But you also have to think about choosing your platforms. We struggle because we entered the world of YouTube 15 years ago as creatives—as guys exploring, wanting to get into Hollywood, and seeing this as a different route. Where we've come to now as entrepreneurs is that we're in the media business.

There's still tension. We want to express our creativity and do things we think are cool, but they're very antithetical to media. What you're talking about is really interesting: You need to pick the right environment.

We think about platforms in the context of permission and interruption. YouTube is an interruptive platform. You have to stop someone in their tracks with a thumbnail to get them to click. Spotify, for example, is a permission-based platform. RSS feeds are permission-based, as is email. We have an email newsletter, and that's where we have permission: people have given us permission to be there.

You're also seeing the rise of memberships, whether it's Patreon or something else. People have said, "You know what? I'll pay whatever you make. I'm in." You can think about those environments as top of funnel and bottom of funnel, or permission and interruption. It's an interesting way to think about this environment.

In this environment, I can play around, and my audience has given us permission. Everyone who's in here has given us permission to talk about whatever we want to talk about. You're not worried about the title, right?

The other trend Friedberg and I have been talking about is building an audience to distribute a product. This is a great broader question: What's the business model? If you have a new creator who's starting to build an audience, advise them on what paths they can walk and where those paths can go. These are some of the options, but when does one become an option?

No matter what, everyone is making videos, attracting an audience, and selling a product. The product is either theirs or someone else's. If we go back in the history of media, why are they called soap operas? They were literally created to sell soap.

It was programming created to attract a specific audience that was interested in buying soap. That's why the programming happened in the middle of the day. The reality is that you can say housewives at that time—

Nobody's going to think you're a misogynist. You said it, not me.

At the time, that was the nuclear family, and that's why they were called soap operas.

For a young creator, I would say the number-one piece of advice is to keep your operation lean and your costs very low. Most great creators can create. If you're a good storyteller, you can make videos right now on your iPhone.

The number-one thing you have to think about is the audience you're engaging, because at the core of it, your product is your relationship with the audience. It's the trust you have with the audience, and that takes a long time to build.

Some creators make the mistake of raising money to start making their content. Others make the mistake of hiring a big staff that creates too much overhead. Then you're going to start doing deals that maybe you don't want to do. You need cash to finance your content first and foremost. Keep it lean, make good stuff, find the audience, and remember that your first 100 videos are going to suck. Just keep building until you find the audience you want.

Then the business models will start to emerge. Maybe I've built a great brand, and part of my content is that I'm Emma Chamberlain and I drink coffee every day. Maybe I should launch a coffee brand and make the coffee I'm drinking every day.

Meaning, make your own brand. But that means you need critical mass and big scale. You're reaching millions and millions of people. The cost is challenging, but the payoff is higher.

It can be. I think CPG is really predicated on connecting with an audience first.

Isn't one of the other paths selling your content? We're seeing a bunch of deals now. MrBeast is getting a deal from Amazon for Beast Games. We're seeing more comedians who do live shows getting deals with Netflix. Hulu and other platforms are starting to bid, and even X might be doing more content deals with people who look more like journalists.

How do you decide whether you want to monetize by ads and by making a product, or whether there's becoming a more liquid market for selling your content to bigger platforms that are losing their audience to independent creators? They need to rebuild an audience. Is that a realistic path, or is it just the cream of the cream that has access to it?

I think that's a realistic path for the top creators. I don't look at it as selling content; I look at it as selling distribution and bringing distribution and audience. The ads get layered onto those platforms.

There's an interesting case study. There's a YouTube channel called The Amazing Digital Circus, which is an animated channel. They did a deal that is super unique, and I think it's the first of its kind: they're distributing on Netflix at the exact same time as they distribute on YouTube.

Netflix licensed the content, and it's coming out at the same time. It's not Netflix's content or proprietary to Netflix. It's a licensing deal.

He's making money on advertising, but he wouldn't be getting paid as much—or they wouldn't be getting paid as much—as if they sold the content and the rights to Netflix. Is that right?

Maybe if it were an original. I guess if it were exclusive.

This is a watershed moment in many ways, because Netflix was really about being the tastemaker and underwriting the content. After Netflix went from licensing DVDs to becoming the creator and arbiter, now it's going back in some ways and saying, "We're going to cherry-pick people off YouTube and give them access to our quarter-billion subscribers."

It's a fascinating moment. If you've seen the Nielsen ratings of connected-TV usage, YouTube is at the top, at 11%. It's the most-used streaming app on connected TVs. Netflix is at 88.5%. In December, after Beast Games, Thursday Night Football, and that movie they did with The Rock, Amazon made a move and moved up to 4%.

You mean Amazon Prime Video moved up?

Right, Amazon Prime Video moved up to 4%, and YouTube is at 11%.

The reality is, there's a really interesting quote from Ted Sarandos when Netflix won its first Emmy for House of Cards. Netflix had been an aggregator beforehand, and then it started producing original programming. It was a massive moment when Netflix won an Emmy, because it was pretty new that an internet tech company could win one.

Ted Sarandos said, "Television is television. It doesn't matter which pipe brings it forward." I think that's really important. The major difference is that Netflix is going to spend $18 billion on content this year. YouTube doesn't spend money on content. YouTube does a revenue share. It technically doesn't know what's going to get uploaded today, and it could be the biggest video of the day. It could be something like The Amazing Digital Circus, which did 500 million views across 3 episodes.

YouTube Premium, which takes the ads out, is at 125 million subscribers.

That number broke recently.

How many people here pay for the premium version of YouTube that takes out the ads? YouTube Premium. The goddamn name. How many people have YouTube Premium?

That's pretty significant. It's like a third of the audience. What is it—$12? $20? I think it's the best $20 I spend.

I agree.

How are the traditional broadcasters that are losing audience going to respond as their audience gets pulled away? We're seeing long-form content take up more time and attention from independent creators. Fox News is losing audience. CNN is losing audience. MSNBC and NBC are losing audience. Their audiences are just vaporizing right now.

What are they going to do? They're well capitalized, they have very motivated shareholders, and they still have advertising dollars flowing in for now. What's their response? If you guys were executives running Fox, what would you do?

We spoke about this recently, but there already are some shows on cable that are starting to act more like digital channels, more like YouTube channels. Saturday Night Live and late-night shows are really just a bunch of segments that can work well when uploaded to YouTube or the internet.

When you bring up Fox News, news is one of the last genres of cable to try to figure out how to put itself into segments that work in the 20-plus-minute range, which is what's working on YouTube right now.

But the long-form content is crushing, too. Our show is 90 minutes. Lex does 3 and a half hours. Joe Rogan's shows are hours long, and he's number 1.

When I say 20-plus, I mean that's the minimum, and it continues to go.

Does that mean they're going to try to license Rogan? Are they going to try to license Lex? Are they going to try to license one of these independent creators? Is that the move they're going to have to make?

Ultimately, that's going to be a big changing of the guard. There's a risk-mitigation element to it that I don't know if they would be comfortable with.

Pat McAfee is a good example. ESPN picked him up. He's a sports guy who was independent.

He came onto ESPN, but ESPN tried something similar with Barstool a while ago. Barstool got taken off the air within an episode or two because they said some things on air and ESPN decided, "We can't do this. Get them off the air."

McAfee is the more mature iteration of that, as both spaces have matured. It's a YouTube show brought to television, and McAfee is really good. I don't know if you saw the College GameDay stuff, where he's doing big field-goal kicks for $100,000.

It's essentially a YouTube title built for television, which then gets clipped and put onto YouTube.

Is the media executive going to go out and find the next up-and-coming creator and say, "I want to bring you on. I'm going to pay you to come and do this on my platform"? Are you going to become a Fox News show or an ESPN show?

They have to give irrational deals to creators.

The other problem is distribution. MrBeast, for example, is in the media business, but he's also in the chocolate business. Being able to get to 200 million or 300 million people in a video is really significant. With YouTube at the top of the connected-TV streaming apps, you'd probably choose YouTube if you're focused purely on distribution.

If you're selling a chocolate brand or some other CPG product, you choose distribution over television. The money and control issues are also very acute.

This week, when This Week in Startups was doing well, I met with the SiriusXM team. They said, "We think you might have some Howard Stern potential. What if you got Travis from Uber—he was very hot at the time—and a couple of guys to come on and do a roundtable thing?"

When we started talking money, I said, "That's less money than This Week in Startups already makes, and I own 100% of it. Would I own the IP here?" They said, "Well, no, we own the IP." This was 6 or 7 years ago.

Even now, once in a while I'll talk to CNBC or somebody will come and say, "Do you have any ideas?" I'm like, "It doesn't economically make sense for a creator who has escape velocity to go backward."

Friedberg, I wonder if the answer to this question is that anybody talented enough—Megyn Kelly, MrBeast, Tucker Carlson—could ever go back to Fox. How could they?

That's the point. I don't think they will. I think it's entropy; it's only going in 1 direction. Their audience is eroding, their advertising dollars are eroding, and whatever broadcasting distribution deals they have on cable are slowly going to be worth less.

Colin, isn't part of it that Fox, SiriusXM, and CNBC have a cost infrastructure? When they meet talent, they say, "Talent gets 20%, we need to get our 20%, and the other 50% or 60% has to go to the shareholders, the building, and the 50 fucking camera operators."

You're 100% right. The model is broken. The great thing about your guys' show is that it started on Zoom. We talked about this in the context of creators, and the advice to an up-and-coming creator is the same advice: keep your overhead costs extremely low.

Creators are the startups of Hollywood. We always say, "Think about a 52-week schedule." Could you do this every week for 52 weeks? If you're someone who loves setting up cameras and lights, sure, you might be able to do that. But if you're busy, you say, "We can hop on Zoom every week for 52 weeks."

If this were what you're describing, there's no fucking way I'd do it. Zero chance. The only reason I do it is because I can get on Zoom for 90 minutes, be done, and then go on with the rest of my workday.

The turning point of the pod was when you used to run out of my operation, and I said, "The guys have to commit to Thursdays at the same time. We cannot—if this is going to work, everybody has to agree that Thursdays at 11:00 a.m."

Pacific or Central, and everybody agreed. We all blocked it out and said, “No, if anybody has to move, then we go to our list of fifth-besties, sixth-besties, and we rotate them in. But we’re not going to move around Chamath’s schedule.” That’s when the show really became sustainable.

Let me take the conversation in the opposite direction. We’re going from points of high leverage—Fox News, lots of cameras, lots of buildings and expenses—to low leverage, being on Zoom with a laptop. Let me talk about the lower-leverage side. Are you seeing any success in entirely AI-generated content channels out there?

As generative AI gets better and better, do we have agents that ingest the news, content, and data, repackage it, and create new versions through an iterative process to hack the algorithm? How do I create stuff that people stay on? What’s the right cut rate, color balance, sound, audio, and music? Ultimately, does AI do what great content creators like Jimmy took 10 years to do in a couple of weeks and create an entirely new category? I’m thinking ahead here, but are you seeing any generative-AI channels with realistic traction?

For me personally, there are no entirely AI-generated channels that I’m watching—or at least that I know of—that I’m consuming and enjoying. But even within our organization, and with a lot of other creators, the number of AI tools we’re using, from scripting to cutting the angles on our show, is continually growing. We’re adopting more and more AI tools, which is the way it should be.

I don’t think the audience can even really tell.

Yeah, right. It’s slowly seeping into production without taking it over. Have you played with NotebookLM?

Yes, it’s pretty amazing. The first time I fed a PDF into NotebookLM was the Spotify earnings report. I had a 20-minute drive and wanted to hear it, and it was 9 minutes long and perfect.

If you don’t know what NotebookLM is, it’s a project by Google. You can feed in a bunch of text, and it turns it into audio with 2 hosts who host it like a podcast. Then I started to think, “Actually, you can custom-make yourself a podcast for your drive.” You can say, “I’m driving for 30 minutes. I want to know about the NFL scores, the Netflix earnings call, and what’s going on in the creator economy.” All of a sudden, you have an aggregate of news and articles turned into audio, and it’s compelling.

Does that replace the time you would otherwise spend listening to podcasts and watching videos?

More so, what’s interesting about generative content, especially with NotebookLM, is that it’s a more efficient way to consume content. But I don’t think we always prioritize efficiency as humans.

No, of course. That would be Soylent. No offense, Bryan, but I’m just saying: this Nutty Pudding concept—my wife makes me the Nutty Pudding, and I’m like, “You know what? I kind of want regular pudding.” I know it’s healthier, but it takes out the spontaneity.

If you want NBA content, I watch this Knicks thing, KnicksFanTV. This guy takes all the clips, and last night the Knicks won in overtime on an amazing buzzer-beater by Mikal Bridges. I was excited to open up KnicksFanTV. He comes on 15 minutes after the game, and I get to watch the community’s reaction. Every time the Knicks win, I give a $100 tip in a Super Chat. I probably give $2,000 or $3,000 a year just to support this creator because it reminds me of WFAN in New York. He has all these regular callers, and it’s such a spectacular product.

Then I noticed that I’m into Corvettes. I’m in the YouTube thing, and I get the Corvette videos in my sidebar. These guys are creating fake AI Corvette announcements that aren’t real, using generative AI and saying, “The new ZR1 is here.” I’m like, “What? I’m going to get the ZR1, and now there’s a ZR17?” I click on it, and it’s an AI voice saying, “Chevy Corvettes are known for having the greatest engines in America.” I blocked that shit. I hit the triple dots and banned the channel.

I would be less dismissive. As we all know, every month we’re a little more surprised by what generative AI can do and by its power. There’s a really important human-directorial role in the early days of this generative-AI revolution, and I think it enables an incredible fragmentation of media, even more than we’re seeing today in the creator economy.

Maybe you end up getting your personal news feed with the newscaster, the podcaster, or the Knicks superfan reading to you what happened at the game last night. That’s entirely generative AI, and it’s indistinguishable from reality. That’s where I think things may get a little funkier over the next couple of years.

I think that also suggests a move away from monoculture into extreme microcultures, which we already kind of have. Each of us opens our phone and gets a different experience.

I have a point of view on this one. I do think that there are shared cultural facts but different cultural experiences of those facts. The game is the game, but the commentator who tells me about the game is different.

That’s where I think this all plays out. I’m going to have my own tuned broadcaster. She could be really beautiful—I don’t know—or she could be really cool. She could be talking to me one-on-one. I don’t know. It could be really weird.

It’s funny: I get on ChatGPT Advanced Voice, and I have this female voice. When my wife is in the car, I start saying, “Hey, baby, what’s going on?” My wife gets so upset.

Yeah, I was about to say, Friedberg, as your attorney, I’m going to go ahead and advise you not to do that. I think that’s where it might start.

By the way, we’re going to come back and talk again in a few minutes. Colin and Samir, thank you guys. We’ll see you guys.

Thanks so much.

Austin’s unique. There are a lot of podcasters here. I came to town, and I have a lot of podcasting friends. As you know, I’m podcast-famous, which is the fame that comes right below reality television.

We’re incredibly lucky because our next guest is both podcast-famous and reality-television-famous, and he’s in Austin. When I came here, I thought, “I’m going to hang with all my podcasting bros.” I texted Tim Ferriss and said, “Tim, let’s get dinner.” Tim said, “I’m trying to find a girlfriend or wife. I’ve got to try to grow up, make a baby, and all that kind of stuff.” So I was out.

Then I texted Lex Fridman. He said, “I’m having panic attacks. I don’t know what to do with my life. I’m existential. I had Kanye on—you told me not to do it, and you were right. Then I had Zelenskyy on, and I had Putin on. Everybody hates me, but everybody loves the pod.” He’s a hot mess, and he can’t find a girlfriend either.

Then I texted Chris Williamson and said, “Hey, let’s have dinner.” He said, “JCal, let’s eat a steak. I need your help. I’m trying to find a girlfriend.” So, ladies and gentlemen, Chris Williamson. We’re going to find out. Such a good wingman. Good to see you. Get over here.

Oh, man.

Chamath is off the program, and now we’ve got a real man on the pod. Chris Williamson will be taking Chamath’s seat going forward. He’s so handsome.

What’s going on? You and I had a little steak dinner, and I think you double-booked, but I appreciate being the first seating on your Friday night. You went out—do you think I’m sloppy seconds for this choice?

No, no. We save the best for last.

There it is. Good save.

Yeah, I’m full. That’s why you’re such a good wingman.

I’m a solid wingman. I helped Lex out a bit. What’s going on on the dating front? Let’s be honest here. Where are you at? A lot of ladies want to know: is Chris Williamson still on the market?

Off the market currently, but I did shave the handlebar mustache, which I think straightened me up as well. People were worried about that.

He showed up for our steak dinner with the porn stash of all porn stashes. It was unbelievable—this handlebar thing. I was like, “Chris, we don’t know each other, but are you straight?”

Like an arrow.

You spent 50% of the meal asking me whether I was straight.

That sounded a little bit like wishful thinking after the lady-doth-protest-too-much.

I thought there was a window. Facial hair—I felt there was a window, but you started it.

In reality television?

Yeah.

Technically, I suppose so. That’s how I got my first taste of media and fame.

You were on Love Island.

That would be fair. Yes. I actually did a reality-TV show before that. I have an illustrious history of reality TV.

Okay.

I was a nightclub promoter, commercial model, DJ, and reality-TV personality.

That’s my career, too, by the way.

I was about to say.

I did a little summer stock. Very similar to your reality TV.

A comedian told me the other day that “commercial male model, club promoter, DJ, reality TV” is otherwise known as “shit bingo.”

Yes, absolutely.

I had a full house.

I did some reality-TV stuff that was basically an existential crisis captured on television 24 hours a day. I was trapped in a house for a little while. Toward the end of my 20s, Rogan, Sam Harris, Alain de Botton from The School of Life, and Jordan Peterson were all coming to the fore. I thought, “Wow, I’m learning a lot from these people. I’m less of an adult infant than I was when I first started listening to them. Maybe if I started my own show, I would be able to have these sorts of conversations.” They felt really nourishing to me.

Nine hundred episodes and a billion and a bit downloads. Did you think about it as an interview show? Were you thinking, “I want to interview people,” or “I want to explore the world,” or “I want to teach people”? What was the idea?

I had nothing to teach people.

Right. At all.

It was very much, “I’m going to find these interesting people who understand how the world works. I want to understand myself and the world around me.”

You start with who you’ve got around you—your friends. Kaiwei Tang, the guy who invented the Light Phone, was episode 10 because I was obsessed with digital minimalism and what social media was doing to our brains. Then there was a season about relationships, a season about health and fitness, and a season about evolutionary psychology.

It’s a thinly veiled autobiography, which I think a lot of people’s true bodies of work are. If you’re following your instinct, you’re just leaving a trail of breadcrumbs showing where your mind was at that time.

You figured out the great hack of podcasting, which is that if you want to learn quickly, you hang out with smart people, ask simple questions, stay present, and listen to the answers. You’re also really good at the follow-up question, which is always how I judge an interviewer—how good they are at being present, rather than saying, “Okay, question one, done. Check. Now let’s go to number two.”

You’re really good at listening and finding the next question. It’s such an amazing hack to learn, build a network, and even build a group of friends.

I always felt reticent because I studied business at university. I did 2 business degrees, including a master’s, and I can’t remember anything from either of them. I spent a lot of time partying—again, club-promoter shit bingo.

I always thought, “I wish I’d studied psychology. I wish I’d followed something more approximating a passion—philosophy, sociology, or something.” Then I realized a couple of years ago, “Well, you have done that. You designed your own degree.” You speak only to the best in their fields about the very specific niche part of their topic that you want to learn, on your terms, with no coursework or homework beyond what you want to do, and you get to call it a job.

Whatever version of the simulation we’re in at the moment, I need to thank the designer, because it’s wild that I get to call this a career.

I think we all feel that way in many respects. Tell me about Sam Harris. He’s a good friend of mine. We had the same book agent for a long time, and I remember having him on my podcast. He said, “What’s podcasting?” I explained it to him, and he said, “How do I do it?” I said, “You get 2 microphones and a guest.” He said, “Then what?” I said, “Then we hit the record button.” I helped him start the pod.

What are your thoughts on what he’s done and his influence? I know you’ve had him on a couple of times.

He’s been on once.

Only once?

Yeah, his wife’s been on as well.

Annaka Harris’s been on as well.

She’s fantastic.

Tell me about your favorite guests. Sam Harris, Jordan Peterson—I know there are a bunch.

It’s like having to choose from 900 children, I suppose. One of the most reliable guests is actually a guy called Rory Sutherland.

You know Rory?

Rory is amazing. For people who don’t know him, imagine a gruff, upper-class British swear uncle who also happens to be one of the best behavioral economists on the planet. He understands consumer behavior like nobody else.

If you go onto Ogilvy’s website and look at the job description for the board members, it says, “Rory Sutherland, vice chairman of Ogilvy.” Rory got to design his own job title specifically so no one actually knows what he does.

He’s fantastic. Speaking to Jordan was great. Alain de Botton from The School of Life sees the human condition very accurately, so it’s fun. I get to indulge my own curiosities and follow my instincts.

Do you think other people can and should do it? This is a big thing I see. People want to create a business through the new creator economy. There are all these paths to monetization and ways to build an audience, and they say, “I’ll go find people to interview and interview them.” What’s the barrier? What makes people really great at this? What’s the challenge in the business, and how do you do it better than others?

Christopher Hitchens said everyone has a book in them, and for most people, that’s where it should stay. I wonder whether podcasting may be something similar. It’s certainly a skill set you can develop.

The best thing is a project that’s so personal to you that you would do it if nobody listened. For me, if everybody switched off tomorrow, I’d still do this. Conversations with people you’re truly interested in learning from are private. It’s a repository of my own autobiography.

That’s really interesting because our podcast was literally us talking with each other about what was going on in the world, how we were maneuvering, and the market things we would literally discuss at the poker table. Then we just did it on Zoom and put it on the internet.

I listen every week. I think the pod’s fantastic. I get to tune in and listen to between 3 and 5 guys, depending on who’s available that week, just having a hang. It feels like you’re dropping in on the poker table or the private room of the steak dinner.

That’s why people are massive fans of the show. It feels like they know you. You have genuine, authentic conversations that you want to have as individuals and that you’re interested in having. It’s like your friend list was just a little better educated than you, and you get to find out what they know. It’s a slightly more elevated conversation.

This is a little different from what we talked about, which is the other side of the creator economy: hacking an audience, making stuff for an audience, growing the audience. Your focus is on algorithmically, technically, and tactically identifying what the audience likes, then focusing on those things and building from there.

This is a very different tack. The right tack, by the way, is to pursue your muse and do something that’s authentically interesting to you. You and I both agree on film and the importance of great films, and the great directors are the ones who were left the hell alone. The great directors were the ones who got deals with the studios where they were told they had complete creative control and final cut.

You can still play that game. I have 2 full-time catalog strategists and 2 back-catalog strategists for YouTube, so we have a big team playing the algorithm game. They’re chopping down clips.

I think it was Tim Ferriss who said that in the short term, your results are determined by your intensity, and in the long term, your results are determined by your consistency. But don’t trade the latter for the former.

If you try to go too hard and do things where you’re being ventriloquized by the audience—trying to reverse-engineer what you think the audience wants from you—then if they stop loving you, not only do you not have the one thing you used to have, but you didn’t even make a body of work that you cared about. You end up resenting the audience.

For me, it’s a bulletproof strategy. You’re going to keep going for longer because you like what you do.

Can we talk about monetization? How do you think about making money? Before we get to that, I want to bang on this a little bit more. You also made a decision about production quality. We were talking before about doing something low-fi just to get ourselves in the same virtual space with Zoom for a couple of hours. Your production quality is absolutely stunning. You care about aesthetics, lighting, and location.

For the audience here, take us through that decision. I don’t know the earliest part of the catalog and whether you did it at that level. You have done some Zoom episodes, I believe, because Rory is only available on Zoom.

I realized about 3 years ago that most podcasters are something with a podcast. They’re UFC fighters with a podcast, comedians with a podcast, investors with a podcast, or whatever. It’s not their profession.

I asked myself, “What would it look like if we turned pro as podcasters?” Part of that is that the lift needs to be very low for most people who are busy doing other things. They can’t spend ages working toward one big production.

I started working with cinematographers. I got one of the best directors of photography in America, out of Nashville. I got a producer, and we hired grips and gaffers. We started using location scouts and dialing in a very specific look.

We started using handheld cameras on tripods, monopods, dollies, and doorway dollies. We did the first 5-camera podcast on an LED video wall, the same technology used for The Mandalorian. As we were talking live, the video controller changed the scenes based on what we talked about. If we moved from a war story to a scary story in a spooky house, we went from an Afghan base with trucks and helicopters to a spooky house.

That’s literally the opposite of what Colin and Samir were saying: keep the budget low. I know enough about production costs to know that sounds like you’re spending $30,000 or $40,000 an episode.

It’s not far off that. We can get it down by squeezing here and there. Thankfully, my line producer is a bully when it comes to trying to get those costs down.

I like pretty things, and I think one way you can excel is to stand out visually. I didn’t see anyone really elevating the way that stuff looked.

Does it change the subject’s mindset and the interview itself when they see how beautiful it is and see the investment in it?

I have a belief that, at least in the world of podcasting, things are splitting into 2 directions. One is perhaps a little more elevated—the Modern Wisdoms and Steven Bartletts of the world. The other is more low-tech: All-In, Matt and Shane’s Secret Podcast, and then Rogan or Flagrant, which sit somewhere in the middle. They’re good quality, but not insane. They’re just facilitating the hang.

I think that barbell is a good way to go. You can lean into the high-end production stuff, and when the guest turns up and sees a 25,000-square-foot warehouse in the middle of LA, a team of 15 people, huge lights, and guys holding dollies, they’re locked in. They’re really there because it feels like an occasion. It isn’t just turning up for a chat.

But that wouldn’t work for every type of show. Sometimes you want to facilitate a little more ease. That’s why I still like doing things over Zoom, Riverside, or whatever we use, because I want to have that casual conversation. Not everyone wants to turn up and have it feel like the World Cup final of podcasting.

Should we go to monetization? How do you start thinking about building the business? Was it a conversation about, “Let me put this out there, make ads, and figure it out later,” or was it deliberate? How’s the model evolving for you?

It was emergent over time. You start by taking whoever you can get: supplement companies, teeth-whitening companies, and whatever is available. You read the ad, and they come in.

I did outreach for the first 500 or 600 episodes of the show. I was managing my own ads, sending the invoices, and slowly scaling up the CPMs. You can get between a $15 and $25 CPM, something like that, audio-only.

I made the commitment not to do ads on YouTube. If it was a virtual episode, it felt like such a low lift that it didn’t justify making people sit through baked-in ads, at least on YouTube.

You mean where you have the option to turn them off?

No. These are hardcoded into the file itself. That’s what “baked in” refers to.

We’ve reached the stage where we have some pretty interesting setups. I think I’m one of the only podcasters who does this. We sell an entire ecosystem. If you come on board as one of what we call our flagship partners, you get a set of impressions across the entire year—let’s say 40 million or 60 million impressions.

You get a number of Instagram Story sequences on my Instagram, newsletter drops on my newsletter, which has 300,000 subscribers and a 50% open rate, and lots of click-throughs. Maybe I’ll come speak at your AGM, or I’ll do something else. We build out this big package that elevates the level of the partner because they’re being thoughtful.

You’re removing the nickel-and-diming of people who should just be buying cost-per-click ads on Meta, and now you have people who are actually thinking about their brand and what they want their brand associated with.

Function Health, which I think is represented here, is an example.

We did a 2-year deal with Function Health, and I love what they do. I use them to track my blood work. Why wouldn’t I want to be in bed with a company that I use all the time?

It deepens the relationship as well.

Exactly. James from LMNT is here. If there’s something he wants to talk about with the brand, I have good insight when it comes to the brand, especially from the creator side or with ad reads. I’m happy to do a couple of hours of work and say, “This is what we’ve seen that’s working.”

When we were talking about the old media model, I’m new to all this stuff, so I’m not deeply embedded in the podcasting space. I just observed something that may be reductive and obvious: you have these pharmaceutical ads on Fox News, in between the segments, and none of the anchors give a shit about the pharmaceutical ad. They don’t talk about it or promote it, and there’s no authenticity or connection to it.

Here, there’s an opportunity to be selective and have the ad be part of the content and the experience. It probably does better with the audience than “Have you talked to your doctor about diarrhea?” or whatever.

In the same way as following your instincts on the show, if you can get yourself to the luxurious position where you get to choose your partners, every product I partner with is something I use.

So you’ve got leverage.

Whitelisted advertising was something we started this week and have had from the beginning: if I don’t use the product or don’t like it, we turn it down. We turn down all kinds of crazy offers.

I was on Megyn Kelly’s show and heard her read one of these ads. I thought, “God, I would never read that ad,” because I know that if you type in the product name followed by “scam” or “complaints,” you get a long list of people complaining about it.

We were talking about her business, and she’s using a third-party agency to sell her partnerships. I said, “Megyn, you’re Megyn Kelly. Just get 2 ad reps and partnership people.” You have to build that leg of the stool. You’ve got the content, the distribution, and the advertising and partners. You have to have all 3 legs of the stool, or else it falls over.

Let me ask you a question. Who have you turned down, advertising-wise? No category—just tell me the category.

Anything to do with investing. We’ve said no to buying gold.

Jonathan Matos hates it because these guys are prepared to spend big money.

You don’t want your customers losing money and being upset at you. They’re not happy. I don’t have the chops to assess whether a bank or a new investment opportunity is legitimate. “Can you turn your Roth IRA into a 401(k) backed by…” I have no idea. I hear these things.

I had Ben Shapiro on. You don’t know either?

No.

That’s interesting.

In the old internet world, companies emerged within DoubleClick and aQuantive that were site-rep firms. There were many independent websites that didn’t have sophisticated sales forces. They couldn’t hire 2 great sales reps to do the work and dial things in. The market wasn’t very liquid, so the site-rep firms would represent the sites and go out to get ads.

Do you see more of those firms emerging today? Are they getting more sophisticated and better at enabling smaller creators to succeed in this space?

It’s a difficult game to play. People can go to creators roughly my size, and it’s very reliable. You know what you’re going to get in terms of plays and demographics. But the shows that are smaller are growing, so you don’t actually know what you’re going to get.

Maybe you can bundle all of these creators together into some weird, dispersed multichannel network that gets sold in bulk by a company sitting above them. But it’s so effortful. When you think that some podcast is going to do 25,000 plays, you have to go through all the rigmarole and red tape and do the ad read to reach 25,000 people, or you could go to Rogan and reach 100 times that number.

Have you ever used site reps?

No.

I always hated the concept, even when we were doing blogs. If you’re going to take it seriously and make it into a great effort, you have to have that relationship and not somebody mediating it.

I think it’s better to focus on the content until you hit the reach necessary to have people calling you on the phone. Then you can choose. There are other monetization options available now, such as merchandise and premium content, so those are better avenues than using these rep firms.

The rep-firm business is terrible because if you do your job and actually make money, and the creator breaks out, they’ll leave you. Megyn Kelly will leave hers, or Tucker Carlson will leave his. I don’t know which firm represents Tucker Carlson and all those people, but I’m shocked. Tucker and Megyn were getting paid $10 million, $20 million, or $30 million a year. They can afford to have 1 or 2 ad people doing this for them instead of giving 40% to somebody else. It just corrupts the whole relationship.

Let me ask you both another question. You now have a great content-creation engine, which is you, and a great content creation and advertising setup. You have ad dollars coming in. How do you get leverage so it’s nonlinear?

Any great business has a nonlinear scaling function. In your business, you’re limited, and you know this. It’s something we’ve talked about with Jimmy and MrBeast: if it’s just you making the content, you can make only a certain number of units per month or per year. That limits the scalability of the revenue and how big this can get.

Do you ever think about creating leverage in the system where you do almost what Spielberg does with Amblin Entertainment, or what any great director-producer does, and scale up? You become the producer network, create a network or studio model, and have several content shows under your brand. Have you thought about that? Is that eventually where this is going, with some of the great breakouts realizing they can scale up and build the next studio model?

If you want to do that, fine, but I have no desire to start managing a ton of other content creators. Managing myself is enough.

What if you still did your show but also had other people you were betting on?

Perhaps. It just doesn’t speak to me all that much. The question is, what do you need this additional money for? Why do you need to continue building more and more profit?

I quite like where I’m at. I like the level of revenue I make, the workload I have, and the fact that I get to spend a morning reading without feeling like I should have been on more Zoom calls. My ability to put my foot on the gas or take it off is exclusively up to me, as opposed to having other obligations.

It’s very much a lifestyle business, and I understand that’s going to cap the upside. There are some things I can do with CPG and some clever advertising that will begin to ramp and ramp, but you have unlimited upside in how you spend your time. You don’t have to work 24/7.

There may be a day when I decide to press that button again, but it’s not right now.

I have YouTube AdSense, the Spotify Partner Program, which is brand-new and is actually generating quite a lot, and the area I think far more podcasters need to look at: monetizing clips.

You do mid-roll ads on long podcast episodes—20 minutes, 30 minutes, 50 minutes, or 100 minutes into an episode—but you can also be 7 minutes into an 8-minute clip. You can put out clips all the time, even 1 a day.

There are other points of leverage. You can use Instagram Stories and newsletters, and you can create these 360-degree deals and fill out the ecosystem wherever you can, without obliterating the viewing experience and making the audience hate you.

There’s international expansion as well. With AI, I don’t know if you’ve experimented with it, but we have a company that does AI dubbing. That will be built into YouTube, so all of a sudden you’ll be in Spanish, Japanese, and French, and the whole cycle will start all over again.

I did try that with This Week in Startups. I got the domain name ThisWeekIn.com, and we did This Week in Poker with Annie Duke, This Week in Music, This Week in Comedy, and a bunch of other versions.

The problem was that you could get an average host, but you couldn’t get someone like Chris or Annie Duke for the long term. We had a guy, Dave Pensado, who’s a music producer, and I wanted to do This Week in Music. He wanted to do The Dave Pensado Show. He had his own view.

The really great creators realize, “I want control of my art. I want control of my brand. I want to own my IP. I want to pick my team. I don’t want to be part of a machine.” What we’re seeing now is people like Megyn Kelly and Tucker Carlson becoming independent. Ben Shapiro started on AM radio in Los Angeles, worked for Breitbart, and now has his own company. He makes his own decisions.

I think the most talented people will want to be independent practitioners.

There’s a weird level that people get to. Anybody sufficiently talented for you to think they’re an auteur probably won’t want to sit underneath anybody else. If someone isn’t that good, you’re just filling the air with something that may not catch.

In the new media world, is it all just lots of independent producers? Is there no studio model?

I think so, absolutely. A lot of people want that lifestyle. What happens when you get rid of distribution? It’s not like we have to ask somebody for permission anymore. It’s not like the record labels, where you had to go to Columbia Records if you were Bob Dylan to get into a record store. You can just do it.

I think the question is whether the economic model allows you to reinvest capital in creating high-quality content. If that capital is invested well, it builds and creates an audience. You give certain people money, people show up, and more money comes out.

Some high points of leverage would be getting a strategist who understands the YouTube algorithm and can ensure that, no matter what you’re recording and how honest and truthful it is to your instinct, it’s presented in the best way for the algorithm.

You can repurpose clips and choose the sections that are most likely to work. One thing that hasn’t been discussed today, which is interesting on YouTube, is timeliness.

YouTube is increasingly becoming where people go to find out their news. Maybe you see something that trends on Twitter and catch a clip, but then you quickly go to YouTube and ask, “Where’s the breakdown?”

Ben Shapiro is a good example. Daily Wire has Ben After Dark—or maybe it’s called something else. It’s not Ben After Dark; it’s Ben in his living room because something has happened today and, before he can get back into the studio tomorrow, they need to make a video. If Trump gets shot today, you need to do your video today because people are going to be searching for it. That’s the hack to get to the top.

We’ve had this issue where we put out a show because we record on Thursday mornings, and it usually doesn’t publish until Friday afternoon. Something happens Thursday after we record, and the show sucks. Literally no one watches it.

That’s not true. Everybody watches it, but the volume goes down 40%.

It’s literally about a 24-hour turnaround.

That’s stale now. That’s old.

Right, which is crazy when you think about it. I think the next great opportunity will be somebody sitting there with the ability to go live at any time.

That’s what a lot of streaming is doing. You look at HasanAbi, Destiny, Asmongold, and Charlie—Penguinz0. All of these guys are doing it now.

They’re also playing video games.

They are, but they’re commenting on a lot of culture, too, and they crush because they’re timely. They usually have some take.

It would be fascinating if somebody with depth—imagine if Sam Harris, when a breaking news story happened, turned on his livestream. You’d think, “Oh my God, we’re getting Sam Harris commenting on this assassination attempt.”

You see it in sports. Bill Simmons has started doing an emergency pod whenever there’s a major trade. When the Kyrie trade happened and when the Luka Dončić trade happened, he just went live. They’re really starting to embrace it. I think that will become a thing.

I often go to the live tab on YouTube now just to see what people are talking about. It’s typically low quality, but once in a while somebody will do something.

We were talking about relatability and authenticity. If somebody is talking about a developing situation that happened 3 hours ago, it has to be relatable. You haven’t had time to become contrived.

What other content do you think is going to win? What will continue to accelerate time and attention away from other forms of content? We have the long-form podcast conversation, learning about the world with me. Are there other formats out there that are interesting to you, that are new or emerging, or that you think are real winners?

I would continue to bet on Substack and that style of blogging. It’s frictionless and enables writers to work out loud. I think Jonathan Haidt basically wrote his entire new book chapter by chapter, published it on his Substack, and allowed feedback generation. There’s another one about the Tower of Babel that he’s working on next.

It’s a seamless, transparent door, so I think writing has huge upside.

I’m not sure what we’re going to see from short-form. I’m aware that it’s able to get to the bottom of your brain stem really well, but TikTok creators don’t seem to be able to convert. One TikTok subscriber is worth—or 100 TikTok subscribers are worth—maybe 1 YouTube subscriber.

A hundred YouTube subscribers are worth 1 email subscriber.

It’s a lot like having a cigarette. You need it, but you don’t want it. You’re not sitting at work thinking, “I can’t wait to watch that TikTok.” You get home and think, “I need my TikTok.”

You do look forward to a great new movie coming out this weekend or the latest episode. You think, “I want that.” You don’t need it, but you want it. There’s a big difference between that and short-form. I think short-form really hits the limbic system. It doesn’t activate the rest of the brain.

I think this form of addiction is going to wind up like MTV. We grew up addicted to MTV and music videos. We were all Gen X—or you’re on the tail end of Gen X.

I’m a millennial.

You’re a millennial.

Millennial.

We got addicted to sitting there and watching 3-minute videos. Everybody thought our brains were getting scrambled because we were watching the “Take on Me” video, and then TikTok said, “Hold my beer. Wait 1 second—7 seconds.”

I think it’s messing with people’s dopamine at a level they don’t understand. You understand it because you dip into this stuff and are interested in it, but you can’t fire your serotonin and see the most exciting, terrifying, or funny moment in every piece of media back to back to back.

Dopamine addiction. It just messes with those dopamine receptors in your brain. The next day, people feel hungover. They can’t have a normal conversation, go to a normal dinner, or feel happy taking a walk and having a long talk.

I think this is one of the reasons I wouldn’t bet against reading. I’m aware it’s way less stimulating, but it feels like going to rehab for your dopamine system. It’s one of the few things you can do where it’s hard to do anything else at the same time.

You can watch a movie on a second screen. You can listen to a podcast while scrolling Instagram, but you can’t read and do anything else.

I’ll tell you what I think might win. My personal point of view is that content will become an AI chat experience. Jason makes fun of me about this, but I sit in my car when I’m driving a lot. My office is in Santa Cruz, and I drive a lot. I talk to ChatGPT Advanced Voice, discuss a topic, learn about it, and engage with it.

If I turn on an audiobook, my brain wanders. I get questions and ideas, and I start thinking about them. Then I realize 3 minutes have gone by. For me personally—and maybe this is just how I’m wired—I like the interactive model.

I do think great content, like Jonathan Haidt’s new book, will be put out in an interactive mode. It will start telling me about the book, I can ask questions, and it will be almost like having a conversation with the author.

That goes back to the earlier point. The cultural experience is different. The book is written by the author, but the way I experience it will be different from the way you experience it in an AI world.

I’d love to look at how people pay attention to a conversation between multiple people—a podcast—compared with an audiobook. The author is trying their best to come across with bounce, energy, and engagement, but really, it’s one person and one tone going through something that was recorded very carefully.

When you have stuff bouncing around, even that author talking about the book on a podcast, why am I so much more engaged? There’s something more compelling about it.

Humans aren’t designed to sit on the floor and be lectured to by another human. They’re designed to be social creatures, to have engagement, and to participate in that process. I think that’s how it plays out in our brains. There’s more responsive chemistry to it.

I’m excited for the pendulum to swing back and for people to read a book again or watch a Kurosawa film in a theater.

That’s 100% right. You can’t watch a Kurosawa film and not feel something.

For a lot of young people, they’re missing out on some of the great beauty in life. You can give yourself over for 2 hours to a Kurosawa film, or give yourself over to a book for an hour—just 1 hour. That’s what we’re going to see in the coming years. People are going to look at this the way they looked at junk food or cigarettes and say, “This isn’t healthy for me.”

You’ve seen the list of the 5 regrets of the dying. They’re things like, “I wish I’d allowed myself to be the person I wanted to be, not the person others expected me to be. I wish I’d worked less. I wish I’d kept in touch with my friends.” I would bet an awfully large amount of money that one of them, starting about 30 years from now, will be, “I wish I’d spent less time on my phone.”

“I wish I’d deleted TikTok.”

Great point. We’re going to continue the conversation. Guys, join us in thanking Chris. We’re going to invite the rest of the crew back out.

Come on out, everybody. Come on up. Here’s my friend Bryan Johnson. Come on up, too. Can we get him a microphone or something?

Chris, will you introduce Bryan?

Bryan Johnson created a payments company. He was on This Week in Startups years ago, and then I looked up and he was sharing his nighttime erections on social media.

3 hours and 12 minutes.

You’re Kardashian-famous now.

Yeah?

You were on the Kardashians?

Last week’s episode.

You were on last week’s episode. Who were you hanging out with—Kim or Khloé?

Andrew Huberman was the star of the show.

Who was Andrew Huberman?

That was my Trump-Zelenskyy moment.

You 2 in a room—is this East Coast-West Coast? Crips and Bloods? Do you guys get along, or is it—

We do get along. We’re friends.

What do you do together?

It’s a secret.

Do you exchange blood? What’s the transhumanist All-In?

They do lab tests on a Saturday morning.

Spotify moving to video is an interesting one to talk about. That’s something people aren’t really factoring in. You turn what was an audio platform into an audio-and-video platform. There are trailers you can see as well, and they’re paying creators a pretty penny.

We were part of the Partner Program in January and February, and we made more money from Spotify—with only 10% of our catalog uploaded—than from the entirety of our YouTube AdSense. They’re throwing everything at it to try to take you.

You don’t use it?

No.

And you’re working on it?

We’re working on it.

I think when platforms announce a new monetization model, they need model citizens. Chris, your show is a model citizen for Spotify. They’ve put you on billboards, and they’re clearly saying, “Modern Wisdom is the show you want to be on Spotify.” It’s video, it looks beautiful, it uploads frequently, and it has a big back catalog.

I think it’s a really interesting model. It feels experimental, but if it works, a share of premium subscription revenue is awesome.

Bryan, are you going to be within the vicinity of that passive smoke? I imagine you’re going to be counting down how many minutes it’s going to knock off your life.

What is this?

That’s a pouch. It’s a nice snus. You can just chew on it.

What’s going to happen if I chew on it?

You’re going to get a little nicotine hit, and you’ll enjoy life for the first time in 3 years.

Go ahead.

I don’t know if this fits in the protocol.

Just chew it.

I don’t know.

Come on. Look at what I’m doing here.

All right. Should I do it?

Wait. Hold on. Before you say something—don’t die.

Is it in your hands? Do I chew on it?

Yes.

That was a very clear response.

It’s either that, or you have to do Chris’s ketamine. It’s one or the other. Which one are you doing?

Which one?

Chris, what would you do?

Ketamine.

You’d do ketamine?

We’ll do it backstage. I’m an ex-club promoter. I do everything.

You did cocaine recently, didn’t you, Bryan?

I did. We used—I built a brain interface at my company, Kernel. We were trying to build wearable fMRI, and we had this question: what happens when you take an SSRI or ketamine?

I did an intramuscular dose, and we measured my brain 30 days before the ketamine, during the ketamine, and afterward.

Was it an injection? Did you snort it, or did you do the injection?

We did the maximum FDA-labeled amount.

You just did it on yourself?

No, we had an IRB. It was ethically approved.

When you say “we,” you mean just you, right?

We spent 6 years building this brain interface. We built a custom ASIC and pushed it through COVID. It was an all-in effort.

You didn’t have an intern or a 23-year-old analyst who could be maxed out on ketamine?

I was also doing Blueprint, so I thought this was interesting. What actually happens to the brain?

Think of your brain like a globe. It has airports all around it, and you can see the traffic—New York to Tokyo. My patterns were very fixed during the 30 days leading up to ketamine. Then I did ketamine, and it scrambled my brain. All the traffic patterns were remixed.

Two or 3 days afterward, the patterns dropped, so I was open-minded to new patterns. Days 3, 4, and 5 brought me back to my old patterns. That’s why it makes sense that there’s a therapeutic window: when you do a psychedelic, you’re open to new ideas and new ways of doing things.

You behaved differently?

I did. On the second day, I was in the office walking between meetings. We have these big walls, and I thought, “Why don’t I just jump over that wall? Why am I going to take this long route?” I jumped over the wall without thinking about it.

What are you doing, jumping over a wall?

I was behaving differently. The way I thought and behaved changed. I couldn’t really see my patterns very well, but we were all watching it so closely.

It was cool to see because, before this, nobody had ever seen ketamine on the brain. You don’t see the patterns that are in place, what’s scrambled, or when they reform. You can take these patterns—think of a 96-by-96 grid—and use them to assess intelligence, emotions, and character traits. It’s very informative.

When you assess and reassemble these patterns, you can infer a lot about the person.

You could have gotten that information without doing ketamine.

I think what you’re referring to is the phenomenon where it drags your hard drive a bit and disconnects you from reality.

Did you dissociate? Did you see yourself outside your own body? Did you see that you’re here, Bryan Johnson is here, then there’s a universe, and then you go past the universe into the space outside the universe?

How much have you done?

Same place, same trip.

I’ve been there. It’s pretty great.

I’m joking about it here, but I have friends who’ve spent a great deal of time, money, and effort on the MAPS project. Tim Ferriss and a number of my friends have worked on this in a clinical setting, and it can have a profound impact on PTSD, relationships, and trauma.

I want to give people a caveat: these are extremely powerful modalities, and you need to do them in the proper setting. Set, setting, and dose are all extremely important.

People with PTSD who are coming out of 9/11—my brother is a firefighter, and there are a lot of firefighters and first responders in New York—haven’t gotten over it. They’ve gone to some of these sessions and come out having found peace. Things that can’t be processed in 100 sessions of psychotherapy can be processed in 2 or 3 of these sessions.

It’s important that we take it seriously, even though some people are doing it at Burning Man and having fun with it.

There’s a dependency risk with ketamine that you don’t have with many of the other substances you can use.

That’s the problem. My friend Tony Hsieh passed away, and he specifically became addicted to ketamine. It dissociated him.

The problem with recreational use, or using it alone, is that it can become dangerous. I know notable CEOs who have gotten into it with good intentions. Then maybe they’re at home watching Netflix or YouTube and using it out of boredom. That’s where it becomes precarious. I’d be careful.

Can we go back to the content-creator piece, Bryan? You started talking about Don’t Die and created quite a bit of content around this. What’s the model for building a business? Did you actively think, “I’ve got to build an audience to make this effort successful”?

No, we actually didn’t. Kate, my co-founder, is here with me. We were posing the question: are we the first generation who won’t die?

Imagine that in 1870, you’re in town and hear people saying, “There’s this new, weird idea. There’s a guy saying there are microscopic objects called bacteria. They cause infection and lead to death.” Others say, “That’s stupid. It’s bad spirits causing the situation.”

If you’re going into surgery, you care whether that’s a correct or incorrect idea. It turns out bacteria are real. They cause infection, and they can lead to death.

I think the parallel for us right now is: are we legitimately the first generation who won’t die? Our effort was to investigate that scientifically.

Someone did a Twitter thread about it, and it went viral. It got 50 million views. We thought, “What the hell is going on?” This tsunami of hate came our way. There was so much raw energy under the topic, and we didn’t know that was the case.

We’ve been trying to take people along on the journey: this is what we’re doing. Content should have been an afterthought to the primary mission, but now it’s a primary modality for us to pursue it.

You productized it. I came home, and my wife was making the Nutty Pudding. I was joking about it—it’s not my favorite, but I’ve had it a couple of times. I eat it, and my wife has the whole cupboard filled with Blueprint products.

I was told the whisper number is over $100 million in sales.

We’ll be at $100 million in less than 12 months.

The goal wasn’t to make money.

No. It went viral, and people said, “I love this. I want to do it, but it’s so damn hard.” You have to source all this stuff. We learned that most labels are incorrect, most things are toxic, and it’s a disaster out there.

We started sourcing our own ingredients and thought, “Why don’t we package this up?” CPG is the worst business in the world, so we were legitimately trying to do the world a solid and make this available.

It’s impossible to do that unless you lose money or make a very modest profit margin.

Very modest.

We’re basically breaking even.

So it’s a for-profit break-even company, not a nonprofit.

The easiest hack you can use if you want to be successful in CPG is to take something people already consume, source it better, improve the formula, and put it back out: a better-for-you pair of underwear, a better-for-you chocolate bar, or a better-for-you hydration drink.

We made a better-for-you energy drink with evidence-based, research-backed nootropic ingredients in efficacious doses. We bootstrapped it, and I built it from the ground up. I created the brand, came up with the copy, organized the shoots, and everything else. I love it.

Now we’ve reached the stage where some really big players are sniffing around, and we’ve only been in the market for 18 months.

Are you guys going to do a CPG business? It’s kind of the trend. What would you do?

We’re a little different. Our value proposition is creator education, so we try to think about what would be an extension of that value proposition. For us, digital goods and courses are a direct extension, so that’s what we have.

As much as Bryan is a content creator, I’ll say that I came across his content and was marginally interested and confused by it. Then I got invited to one of his dinners. I really commend you for doing the dinners, because I think they’re unscalable but actually create a lot of scale.

People come to those dinners, like me, and I’ve been talking about that dinner for 6 or 7 months. I’ve told a lot of people about it, and it was a very impactful event.

I think creators today who are doing things like this—getting people together physically and having face-to-face impact—can build a product. Last week, when we were here, there was a creator named Jake Shane who sold out the Moody Center. It was about 3,000 people. He started as a TikTok creator and performed comedy by himself for an hour and a half. It was amazing.

I think getting people together and having that face-to-face impact is where you can build a product. You were saying it would be lovely to have a countermovement against the TikTokification of very short-form video.

I do get the sense that coffee and chill—have you heard of coffee and chill?—or Mushroom Cowboy, these daytime sober raves, could be part of that. People come together for a couple of hours on a Saturday or Sunday from 10:00 a.m.

Or midday or something like that. I think what we're seeing is the equivalent of the work-from-anywhere, digital-nomad lifestyle: wake up whenever you want, fuel yourself with caffeine, and get back to work. This is the backlash against that. People are desperate for in-person events and for stuff like this. It's not just this—think about any conference you've ever been to. The speakers are cool, and they're the headliners you go to see, but what you're really there for are the conversations in the foyer between the different events.

I have to say, the higher the barrier, sometimes the bigger the fan. Your episodes are 3 hours long, which is a pretty big barrier. You get to the end and you're invested; you're a fan of you guys. I think the same thing applies to events. There are brands and creators now that are starting with events.

I think it makes so much sense. Think about it: you give up your form of social engagement in a free, unstructured way as soon as you're done with college. Then you're at the workplace, and if you're working in an office, it's like you have the thing to do and then you're done. Where else do you have this kind of social engagement at scale?

They also preselect you. As you say, if it's a 3-hour-long podcast, it's a really niche topic. It's a particular series of Warhammer 40,000 that not many people know about, or it's some weird Japanese anime. You're preselecting for people like you, assuming that you're interested in it. This is why Reddit is so good: Reddit is a website filled with people who couldn't find others to have that discussion with in their hometown.

Right. That's very true. It's very true.

I just want to point out that with these CPG products, the creators who are making them—when you two gentlemen make something, or Sacks is making this All-In tequila, or Mark Sisson is making these Supergut bars, and he has Supergut, which is fantastic—the point is that Friedberg is not making Supergut, you're not making Blueprint, and you're not making Tonic or NewTonic because you want to maximize profitability. You want to be proud of it. You want to know that the person buying it had a great experience and that it was good for them.

There was a hole that didn't exist, and the other thing, which I'm sure you guys have sensed as well, is that the online course is the best way—if you want to do it, the margins are amazing and the scale is fantastic. But you never get to see someone holding your course. If you do it as cohorts, which we have done, you do get to see them digitally. Now our idea is to say, “Can we take that and have it also be an entry into a live workshop or live session?”

That's going to crush. You're perilously close to creating Tony Robbins. I can see you onstage. I'll make a bet right now that it'll make you guys more money than anything else combined.

I think that's by far the answer to your question from before. Right now, the reality is that a single-check brand deal makes more money when it's one client. But what we're watching right now in the course business is that 100 people on an $800 product is significant, and 1,000 people gets even more significant. You guys will sell tickets to the live event, but the sponsors, to get that targeted audience in a captive way, will pay you more than they'll pay for the online version.

You should also think about the value proposition. People go to school, go $50,000 or $250,000 into debt, and then what I hear from young people all the time is that they take a course afterward. That course, for $800, does more for them in the marketplace and in getting jobs than the degree did.

I think this roll-your-own education is very similar to Function Health in a way. It's, “I'm going to take control of it. I'm not going to have an M.D. direct my health care. I'm going to get my blood work myself, do my research, go on ChatGPT or Grok or whatever, ask about peptides, ask about this, cross-reference it, and listen to your podcast or Huberman or whatever.” This self-reliance and this new category of products and services reset the industrialization that occurred.

I'm sure Procter & Gamble and some of these companies didn't start out with the evil intent that's now in their products and systems.

You have to cut that out. I don't give a fuck. I'm not on Procter & Gamble's side. Their products and cereals can go. They're bad guys. I don't give a fuck about their sponsorships. Seriously, they're putting dye in children's cereal and corn syrup in children's cereal. They're poisoning the country to make an extra 2, 3, 4, or 5 cents.

I guarantee you're using Procter & Gamble toothpaste in about 3 hours.

No, no, no. My wife puts me on all this shit. I'm telling you, they are literally putting dye in children's cereal. They're putting corn syrup in children's cereal. They're poisoning the country to make an extra 2, 3, 4, or 5 cents.

You used the C-word.

I agree, Jason. We can cut it, but I agree. We just launched a new endeavor called Don't Die Certified, and we're testing foods—baby foods, pet foods, and all packaged foods. We got the early results back.

You got the receipts?

We do.

How bad is it?

Worse than you think.

What did you test, Bryan?

We're doing heavy metals, glyphosate, some other agrochemicals, and maybe a few PFAS.

What's the worst product you've got so far? Have you done plastics, or is that separate?

We're doing that too, so we'll probably have it later. There's less evidence around that, but yes. The cool model we're doing is this: you find your food on the website—we'll launch this next week—and say, “I want this tested.” You can then put up the money. If enough people contribute, the test gets triggered.

What does that cost, 3 or 4 grand?

No, about $500.

What?

We're doing crowdfunding. Other people who also eat that thing from Sweetgreen can say, “I want to know if it's got loads of plastics in it.”

Exactly.

Then the test gets triggered, the results come back, and we go to the brand and say, “Come claim your product.” They come back, and we say, “All right, now pay back the people who funded your tests. You should have been testing in the first place.” They're doing the work for you.

We want to test foods in the U.S. We want to test 20% of the foods that make up 80% of the U.S. diet. Then we can say, “On average, the average American consumes this much mercury per day, this much cadmium,” or whatever.

We tested a few things. We looked at diapers, and there was a dangerously high level of glyphosate in diapers with the cotton.

The cotton?

Cotton, exactly—Roundup Ready cotton, exactly. We also tested tampons.

Brand-name tampons had high heavy metals? Which brands? Call them out right now.

We can't yet. We have to get the tests soon.

Exactly.

We're going to reveal the first few. Dog food was really bad, which makes sense. Dogs have been living shorter lives now, but once you start seeing this, it's pretty disturbing.

Have you guys checked out PlasticList.org?

Oh, yeah. That's another rich dude spending his money intelligently. I love it.

I know it's super hyperbolic, but with the plastics issue, it's really important to look at the absolute numbers. This is where it can get a little too carried away. There's a lot of shocking stuff in there that's really bad, but you also have to recognize that a tiny amount—one-trillionth of something that could ever affect your body and that your body may flush out—may not be that bad. We've got to be really cognizant of how we interpret this stuff.

These fuckers knew the whole time they were doing it. They knew what they were doing. And you got fired up.

Vani Hari turns up with 400,000 signatures outside Kellogg's headquarters and says, “You're making it in the same factory as the Canadian version, which uses beet coloring and carrot coloring to make it.” The exact same factory is using Red 40.

There was also a law passed by California saying that baby-food providers have to disclose heavy metals in their foods. It went into effect January 1. We went to Gerber's website, where they list the 4 big heavy metals, and I couldn't find the heavy-metal results anywhere.

Then I realized my VPN was on and I was coming from a server outside California. They had IP-blocked it.

No way.

Yep. California-only IP origination, and they hide it. This is what I'm saying: these companies are nefarious. It's really not good.

What do you think of Bobby Kennedy, friend of the pod, and him taking this on for MAHA? I don't want to make it political, but how do we get this to happen, Friedberg?

This is the good shit, man. This is the good shit.

Yeah, they love it, man.

This is how it all works. We take little detours. This is a side quest worth taking.

Give me one of your nicotine drinks, J.B.

There are others in the other green room. There are some in the other green room.

I'm okay. I did a lot of drugs earlier.

I think Bobby Kennedy is going to challenge status-quo power, and I think that's going to create a lot of conflict and reconfigurations. I think it'll re-fragment. There's a lot of really important questions being asked that aren't being asked in the way they're being asked now. That's the most important thing: the system needs to be challenged.

Whatever's left will get hardened, and whatever shouldn't be there will get blasted away. That's it. But you've got to name and shame. The thing that really pisses me off is that you have to name and shame in order for them to do what's right. That's what's so fucked up.

Do you want to do any of the AMAs? I don't know. It felt like this was going in a nice direction, and I enjoyed the conversation. Let's see if there are any cool AMAs where people are asking these questions. I've got a question for Bryan in the meantime. I'll look for a good question.

Sure, Bryan. If you were to answer without someone having to completely decimate their entire diet and never look at meat again, what would you say are the top 3 lifestyle changes most people should look at making, based on what you guys have looked at?

The power laws are so clear. Sleep is by far the biggest power law. Then exercise is number 2, and diet is number 3. It's about being consistent on those 3 things. Once you get those 3 layers, you can go down to the other layers.

What we've tried to do is say that anything that increases my speed of aging is a form of dying. How do you eliminate that? We started with the power laws, from zero all the way down.

What are the top 3 things for sleep?

The thing you want to do is lower your resting heart rate before bed. That's the key marker. If you could optimize 1 marker in your entire life, it would be that. Before you go to bed tonight, look at a wearable or take your pulse. That's your resting heart rate.

Let's say you're at 55 tonight. Your goal over the next week or 2 is to try to get down to 50, and the next month to 45. The way you drive it down is to have your final meal of the day at least 2 hours before bedtime. If you go to bed at 10, be done eating at 8. Then push it back another hour, about 30 minutes each day.

As you push it back more every day, your heart rate will go down incrementally because your body has more time to digest. You'll also find that the food you eat matters. If you eat a big pasta dish or pizza, it will jack up your heart rate.

Mine right now is 44 beats per minute. If I eat late in the day—my last meal is usually at noon, after a few hundred experiments to see what optimizes my resting heart rate—and then have a big meal at 5 or 6, I'll be in the low 50s. That takes away about 30% to 40% of my sleep.

So you go to sleep super hungry?

Actually, I'm okay. My body is really adapted. Food is a really big one.

The second thing is a wind-down routine. You need to calm yourself down. You can't have your phone up; you need to turn it off and give yourself 30 to 60 minutes to decompress at the end of the day.

Or leave your kids in the house and go sleep in the garage.

No. A warm shower can help, and a book in hand has probably the best evidence. It's what Chris was saying: you can't do anything else. Screen off, book in hand, and spend even 10 minutes. You'll be amazed at how much it'll calm you down.

There was some interesting research around people thinking it was the blue light from screens that was affecting melatonin release and cortisol as you went to sleep. It seems like it's much more about what you're interacting with on the phone. You're so engaged that dopamine is firing, and you're probably getting riled up about messages you're sending to friends. It's triggering all of these ideas in you, as opposed to sitting down and reading Red Rising by Pierce Brown and going off to sleep dreaming about being there.

Exactly. You can measure it by how much your heart rate goes up or down. You now have a quantitative benchmark every day to track those habits.

Regularity versus duration—which is more important?

Consistency is so important because your body tells time like a clock. I did 8 months of perfect sleep—100% sleep every night—to show that I could get high-quality sleep.

Were you tracking on Whoop?

Yeah, and they tend to be pretty close.

They're all relative comparisons, not absolute ones. Just find one; they're all fine. This has been the big unlock for me. I'm now sleeping well. I got a 94 last night and a 99 2 nights ago, my highest score ever. I'm really dialing in my sleep, and it has changed everything for me. It's the biggest life improvement you can make, period. It's the best performance-enhancing drug on the market.

Be consistent, because your deep-sleep window happens in the first 2 hours of the night. That's when the garbage collector comes through to pick up all the trash in your body. If you miss that window, you miss it. You miss the garbage collection. Pick your bedtime and be consistent; otherwise, you get junk accumulation.

I have a 6-week-old baby, so I have the least consistent sleep right now. How long can I endure that?

I'll tell you 2 things that also worked for me. I sometimes sleep with my bulldog, and that was killing my sleep. I got some nice headphones, listened to high-fidelity sleep music, and used an eye mask. Both of those added a couple of points, and that was a really good unlock for me.

How are you sleeping, Chris?

Pretty good, pretty good, thank you. I listen to an audiobook as I go to sleep and turn it off.

Bryan Johnson, are you worried about ionizing or nonionizing radiation? Do Bluetooth headphones bother you?

No.

That's the first thing I've proposed to you that I'm still allowed to do in my life. Everything else is the fun police coming in and telling me everything's the diet police, I guess.

I'm actually the happy police. The misconception is that staying up late, missing bedtime, and drinking is happy. It's not. It's sad, and it makes you depressed. We have to be honest: we think it's happy, but it's not.

Well, listen, thank you to all of our guests. I know you're very busy, and I really appreciate you coming here. Congratulations on the big win for “No Country for Old Men”—that was an Oscars reference. Thank you to the people who got it.

Seriously, are you worried? Are you sure what you're doing at this extreme is a good idea? I'm a little concerned you might be turning into a vampire. You are doing the blood transfusion?

I did it because my dad was experiencing cognitive decline. He called me in a panic and said, “I will do anything to save my consciousness.” So I did it for him. The headlines were all about my son, my dad, and me.

You did a transfusion with your dad after doing it with your son?

Yes, it was a tri-generational transfusion. My dad called me and said, “Okay, I'm experiencing cognitive decline.” He was writing something for work, walked away, and came back to find it was a jumbled mess. He said, “I'm experiencing cognitive decline, and I can't see it. I thought I would start forgetting names or misplacing keys, but I didn't see the jumbled mess right in front of me.”

He called me and said, “I'm panicking.” I told him, “Dad, we're actually looking at this new evidence on plasma infusions. I'm happy to give you plasma if you want to try it. We don't know whether it's going to work or not.”

Then my son heard, and he said, “I'm in. We'll do a tri-generational thing.” Great. It's a family activity.

Is there any empirical evidence of this?

Yes. We should talk about this another time, but there's a lot of good work on it.

Do you think this is a path worth pursuing?

It's a longer conversation.

What are you doing afterward? Do you want to do some transfusions?

I'm doing cupping with Bryan.

Okay, can we transfuse as well?