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

we'll bleep out every mention because this is the zero cloud podcast zero cloud chasing podcast and we have a no cloud policy we did not we did not wanna do that wait but do we have to use this face on a thumbnail no we're gonna blur it out and i think we have to put like his face and then reed face next to it and blur out reed face and the thumbnail like the man behind the scenes there's was something ridiculous i feel like got rude to wear know why i could be what i want to from at all in in like a days off on a road less travel never we got read from night media he's famous for managing a bunch of awesome youtubers including one huge youtuber probably the biggest youtuber in the world but you know what every interview is just people asking him about this other guy i find that to be a little dis a little a little disrespectful and and very much cloud chasing and i just you know me and sam we were texted this morning and we just said you know what he's coming on today we're not saying you could bleep that out we're not saying that name you know let's just have a good conversation with this guy and not chase the cloud which is very hard it's very hard to do because you know you get those clicks when you do it but we're not gonna do it so that's this episode we're gonna talk to him about his agency different creator businesses to how creators are building these like often multi hundred million dollar businesses like logan paul's prime and other businesses like that so good good conversation there but we also have a second announcement and the second announcement is that it is producer benz last day last day producing an episode this is it this is your your michael jordan shot against the jazz will there be a wizard come back i don't know what but but this might be your walk off alright here's the rules you can't say anything about next chapter or adventure i don't wanna hear that and you can't generically say you learned so much if you say you learned so much you better tell us exactly what you learned alright those are the rules for this speech okay great so the next the next thing for me is basically focusing on how to take over the world getting the podcast as as big as possible speaking of like things i learned when i was here i think people talk a lot about focus right and focus is maybe easier when things are not going well because if focus about saying no the world is like saying no to you but when things start going well all a sudden the world is like saying yes to you have all these opportunities right and so that was i think one of the things that happened to me early on when i came on my first million all these people were like oh ben wilson in the new hot do you wanna try this do you wanna do this what about youtube are we should make some shorts you new tiktok and i was like yes yes yes yes yes i wanna do like all these things right and so i had all these kinda half finished projects that ended up not going anywhere because those maybe a little too dispersed in my attention so now it's like no no just let's get the podcast to be one of the best podcasts in the world that's all i'm focusing on for the next year and then we'll see what happens after that there's nothing better quitting your job when you have the twins let alone even one baby what kind of responsible mormon are you i well how what kind of decision was this reckless at best well i mean it's it's not like i'm starting from zero right it's not like i have an idea for a podcast luckily you guys have put me in a position where the podcast is doing pretty well right now so even if i have a bad year and and it doesn't grow that much i'll be fine and if it goes really well then things will be great so it's a little bit of a risk but not existential risk and do you have i don't know message to the fans what do how do wanna leave us here what where do wanna go with this so obviously the first message go follow how to take over the world wherever your podcast you'll love it i guess the the the most important thing is thank you guys my life changed however a year and a half ago when when you guys brought me on the show and i called the the ride of lifetime but really like i didn't know if i would be able to make a living as a creator before you guys brought me on here now now i know that i can do that at least in in some capacity and so my life's completely changed so so thank you this has been amazing i love doing it and to everyone who has like supported me been such a fan cheered for me on the podcast like thank you to you guys you listeners as well it's meant a ton and i've loved it so i guess that's the last thing i'm just very very grateful for this opportunity i've had the reason i didn't like celebrate you leaving because i'm like you're know not really going anywhere you'll be around you're just gonna be unemployed for a little while and hopefully it works out but i'm sure it will be and i'm happy you kinda came in our lives this it's fun heavy around we're hiring for producer enough we we we make it out of producer down yeah so we're you we're you what sean's filipino no assistance for a little while but i don't know if that's gonna work out but yeah my mom is trying to download audacity morning so we'll see what we could do yeah so we need a producer but yeah ben we love you and thank you for everything you did you you were mostly decent at a handful of things the it was like this was the ride of a year and a half i gotta tell you oh yes it was a leisure walk but it was flat enough no bed you're amazing i i i still listen to all the pods so that's how i know that it's a good pot i'm glad doing this because we need more episodes like if you go i've listened to all the episodes i just need more episodes so this is good i'm glad you're doing this thank you so much for everything that you've done you've brought a lot of i don't know good support and good energy to to what we do we make it very easy for me and sam because we just get to show up perform and then not think about it after like as soon as we hit done me and sam i don't really have to think about anything and that's because of you and a bunch of other people behind the scenes and so thanks for everything you've done man and we will all go in solidarity the gentleman's agreement today you don't subscribe to us you go subscribe to how to take over the world fantastic podcast basically talks about i don't know great conqueror and people who achieved greatness and great things ben goes and reads like fifty books and then just summarize it into one awesome podcast story one hour so you don't have to go read all those books and you get the away from him so it's an amazing amazing podcast go go subscribe thanks ben talk soon we're live now i would read i went and listened to a bunch of interviews i did the i forget the guy's name i like him a lot the financial youtuber in vegas and then i watched oh graham stefan yeah graham stefan and then i watched sami and colin and and then a few others that you did including your channel and i was like sean what if we just don't say the word the whole time because he's great but i know i i i i've learned i've learned a bit about it which you know let's just not mention once it's a bad business decision not gonna get the views you're not gonna get the clicks you're not gonna get all that stuff but i don't really care in fact actually it's a great business decision decision to not be chasing the algorithm so i say we just talk about whatever was actually whatever is actually interesting i think it might be no blip so yeah i think we might be able to go the whole episode without it let's try it's totally up to you guys the con the conan mirror video is like took off i i think we we'd expected it to do well i don't think i expected it to get whatever it's on four point seven million views but yeah you're like who's counting as accurate as of today but who's counting is it accurate yeah absolutely pretty much the exact number how do you how do you describe yourself you're the founder of night media but night media has a studio division you have night capital i believe you have i mean night media in itself it it's fairly simple it's just like a endeavor or one of these other agencies but it's a different genre but how do you how do you kinda like describe what you do yeah we've we've started to call ourselves a creator holding company so we at the center of the business we represent talent and that's been consistent since say i started the business since two thousand fifteen but we built out these other verticals now to mention we have a venture studio which has created things like feast we have a studio which is like making shows on streaming services we have a venture capital fund which is called knight ventures it's twenty million dollar fund and then we announced knight capital which is a hundred million dollar growth vehicle so for us it's like a platform creator holding company and yeah it's i think early on it was much easier to just say a talent manager now it's it's a little more confusing when i'm like you know i can be entrepreneurial i can be investor i'm also talent manager so i kinda playing in a lot of different spaces i think it's great because talent manager seems to be a horrible business from what i could tell i i've met a few talent managers and basically you you're you're either talent poor in which case your business sucks or you get talent rich but then your business is always hanging on a thread of this one well or two will relationship and even then the value cap you might create a lot of value with the value captures is fairly small compared to what you're doing now where you got at this investing vehicle and you gotta got all these other components you said studio making shows for streaming what have you guys made have you guys made anything that's come out we did a lot of stuff early on with youtube originals and that was kind of the emphasis of like why we wanted to get into it because netflix and hbo and and hulu and all these place is starting ask started to ask us to make shows with them and so you know creator games and some of the other things that we did with youtube originals led us into what we're developing now which i don't know if i can technically say anything about what's coming out obviously say there's like there's cameras around constantly as well but yeah we we have a a few things like within scripted one within non scripted and then working on a few like different doc men type things right now so we'll we'll have like a i think a pretty decent slate by next year we'll see how the the writers strike and everything plays itself out i think that one's been a little interesting for us to get used to but yeah we'll we'll have a bunch of different things like coming out in what is it summer twenty twenty three sometime in early twenty twenty four is the agency business sean was he was joking but he's being serious in that it it's a bad business is that actually a bad business because when i would like i mean i don't i'm totally outside of hollywood when i see like r emmanuel i'm like it looks like your cat his personal cash flow was pretty decent on the rise versus a lot of like startups ups you know you're you're you're kind of in poverty until you have a some type of liquid event it seems like you guys have some type of bullet let's let's explain the structure right so so what what is the what is the structure of a a talent talent agency so first you basically you you recruit talent you say okay you're i'm gonna help you with your business side of your operations or get you brand deals or get you things that you that you want now in the world of youtube are those exclusive or non exclusive like for example for an nba player their manager their agent is they're exclusive representative or they could fire them but like no you can't have multiple people bringing in them deals at all has to go through that person they get a cut of everything so is it usually exclusive or non exclusive when it comes to youtube i think it depends on the type of management company we've always kinda sat on the fence of exclusive and i i think the interesting thing about talent management businesses is they're they generate a lot of cash and so most of the the management companies that you look at that have actually started to create things like when you look at just the big let's just look at the big hollywood agencies like three arts entertainment three sixty pearls the ones that have built some of the and and launch some of the biggest shows like it's all sunny and friends and seinfeld and some of these things that they have back end on that they will just have back end and perpetuity on which those things are ending but those businesses generate a lot of cash think the thing that they've struggled with is like how do you build something much bigger than just this cash generating management company and so when i started night the management company was really like the wedge of access into everything else and that and that's really how i looked like if you could represent the biggest start with digital creators because me like starting this business by myself outside of the hollywood system was very hard to say i'm gonna go assign an actor actress musician because that is very much dominated by the hollywood sphere and so i i knew that it would be much easier for me to build a wedge in digital and they'll represent you know i started would do perfect in twenty thirteen but they'll represent digital creators build that wedge and then use that as the access point either continue building a bigger management company you know the verticals or to go build you know something with an venture studio have a venture capital firm like the acts the the the management company gives you access to everything else and that's how i saw this in two thousand fifteen and i think that the managers that realize that and there's some some really like good ones that have realized that map carter i think realized that pretty early on is like the management business is kind of the means to the end to build uninterrupted and some of the other things that he's doing with lebron think scooters is probably the best example of like what if it could became off the management company and so that that's really how we've thought about it is like you know management is the core of our business but it's really the like allows us to to have a wedge that gets us into everything else so that kind proves the point right like if so if a business has to be a means to an end it's probably in itself not the best business to stay at you mentioned a couple of those those sound like pretty cool businesses so maverick carter is lebron longtime friend i think high school i think he's is he one of part of the high school crew for lebron or did he come a little bit later i think one of them came later i i think he was i i don't know the full story i think rich paul was was came came later after high school i think m was actually a high school friend and became his manager and they went on to you know now have a production company and a few other things seems like one of the few times that would work out well by the way you like your high school buddy like taking the reins so good good good for them and and so they have a they have a a a company that does you know basically production and maybe investing because i think they own a bunch of peach a bunch of like pizza chains and other things like that so they do investing they do production you mentioned scooter braun and his business and so what what what is his business is that like that sounds like that might be a fantastic business what is it well it's it started off i mean if everyone knows the story probably that he met justin or or found justin on youtube when he was really young reached out you know the rest is kind of history there but he he ended up building a music management company that was really like i think that the cash out of that business was more touring right with ariana grande justin bieber versus some of the other people and then he sold it to hive about i wanna say a year ago or eighteen months ago they started either buying other management companies they're buying music catalogs they're doing a lot of different things right now and he had he he did build quite a few things with some of the talent i know justin and him built i can't remember what the clothing business is and there are some other like auxiliary businesses that came out of it and they also did a lot of investing a lot of venture investing and so i i so he sold it for a billion dollars yep he sold he's he sold his media company it holdings to to hide for one billion and i think that's because it had those kinda like you said like royal royalties on on the on the music itself not just like the touring which might you know stop tomorrow and who who knows what happens in the youtube world there's no like royalties structure correct like if you're a talent manager for twitch creators or for youtubers you get a cut of these brand deals ten fifteen percent whatever it is but there's no like royalties you have to like build other ip to get the royalties right yeah when there's there's also no backend end deals like i said earlier where you know b or some management company in hollywood maybe helped launch it's all sunny and now they have these like residual checks coming in every single month or every single year that also doesn't exist in the digital space and so we had to figure out like what that packaging business was for us and we ultimately landed on we think it's business building like we think some of the biggest outcomes for celebrities over the last decade have been through products right beats by tray probably the best example of of something i mean bought like a vitamin and water was another one where it's like athletes and different people had equity in those businesses so we think our packaging businesses is essentially this business building which we called night labs which a lot of different things have come out of now but yeah the the management company has then allowed us to build these businesses with creators where we take equity and we think that like that business is much more interesting long term than just continuing to stack a management business which some of these new companies do very well and you know they're thirty forty fifty million eb businesses a year i think they're now trying to figure out like what what do we either build on top of this big cash generating business or do we just keep doing it because the partners every single year are making three four or five million dollars a year do you of of your of this the night night media night studios of your wholly owned thing how many staff do you have at the moment i believe we're just over sixty so sixty three full time within the night ecosystem right now and and some of the teams are relatively lean i would say our ventures team is is is lean it's like three people our studio team is still and that's like our venture studio is relatively lean with about six in the majority of the company is talent managers and then individual like pod systems where a talent manager will have a junior manager multiple coordinators maybe an assistant onto that pod and then that pod will represent anywhere between i would say five to seven creators on average and are you managing someone as well as running the sixty person operation i just managed that happened about two years two to three years ago where i was like this is taking up way too much of my time and also it's like it's also the best use of my time and this was really like when we had started feast was an idea we were you i was you know purdue helping him produce creator there's was just a lot going on while he was also growing doing multi language all these other things and so that's when i like fully just like kinda red dedicated my time to everything that was going on on his end so you're able to get you know your cut from managing him as well as from owning the sixty person company yep so so in in that regard it seems like things are pretty good even though you wanna to take company so yeah i think things that i think are all a little hectic and you know i'm i'm most of my focus right now is on festivals i think you guys have you united i'm sure you've seen the drop bars that to us is like and i are probably focusing the majority of our energy on that business right now just because it's growing so quickly and know we just launched in the uk we have other global launches that we wanna do this year and it's just building into twenty twenty four and so i i knew this would eventually happen where you represent a creator and then the business that you're starting becomes a big opportunity that you really wanna chase and we think feast is is really turning into that and so i've directed a lot of my energies toward that business and it's like slowly slowly consuming my life at the moment before you started night media what what interested you what where were you at a start instead of that well i grew up watching jerry maguire probably like everyone else and so i wanted to be a sports agent like i wanted to represent rod ti well like i i wanted to do that like bigger than life you know agent representing an nfl football player and so that's i what i wanted to do and i i knew that like because i played football in college and freshman year college i realized that guys are built different i would one couldn't run a four three i wasn't two hundred and twenty five pound wide receiver that was five thirty six five and so i knew like playing in the nfl was gonna be very very difficult just seen that the the level of high school to division one football that i was at and so you know i started seeing that a lot of the players that i was playing with were going to the nfl some of them were getting drafted some of them were going to have like nfl careers that lasted ten years and so i positioned myself to to be a representative for those players and that's really what i wanted to do and then stumbled upon youtube in twenty thirteen and kinda just became obsessed with it and in college i didn't watch youtube like i was so focused on book football didn't really watch anything on the internet and that changed the trajectory of my whole career i saw this t shirt on instagram yesterday it said creative are the new athletes and somebody was wearing that and i thought to myself kind of a lame t shirt but i see where they're coming from you know i i i i get what they're saying you know the i i don't know if you're seeing sam these these deals that creators are from twitch are signing with kick what's the this like i heard you talk about it what is it it's just a twitch alternative so kick is basically a twitch alternative but the the kind of the interesting park is it started by this gambling company stake so we talked about state before remember it's this company that just absolutely prints cash and one of the main ways the main way that steak was growing or one of the best growth mechanisms was they would pay streamers or give streamers money to gamble on steak live on stream so people got to see did then they give drake like a jet yeah the grave drake like twenty million dollars and whatever but the the issue was you couldn't do it in america right so a lot of the streamers and and they would have to go to mexico or canada and it's still very much like that you can't do it in america yeah you go like get on a boat go to international waters and start your stream they basically yeah and a lot of the guys were doing this in mexico and so net now kick basically came in they started a kick as like a distribution like taco funnel on top of this gambling business which who knows that it's gonna be legal in the us in two to three years they actually have stake dot us that you can play in america it's just a lot of the games that you have on state dot com are not there but yeah a lot of controversy on on this topic because twitch band it and that's why kick started is because twitch band all gambling on their website it's like there's these stories sometimes in business where it's like like i have a buddy who's like this the guys who bought no road they own one of them started this thing called j m j m bull which is like a gold it's the biggest website for buying and selling gold online and i was like how'd did you do what's the origin story and he's telling me the origin story and and really when he started he was just trying to be a lead gen for like somebody else would fulfill the orders he didn't have any gold inventory he wasn't shipping anything he was did i'm a affiliate marker i just i get the lead from google somebody places the order i go tell the the the company who actually does this thing to go sell it to go send it to him and what happened was that they were they're kinda yank them around changing the rates and eventually they just cut them off he's like oh my god they just killed my business like they don't want my customers like what do i do is like well either i take this zero or i create the whole like distribute i create the whole supply chain myself i basically go i get the physical inventory i get the warehouses and we start shipping this ourselves so that's what they did they ended up becoming bigger than the other company and i think they bought them along the way they bought that other company that had rejected them and like went on to become the number one site for this and it's kind of the same the same thing that you're talking about here with like kick was using twitch as like a distribution platform and then when it did work they're like alright we'll have to make our own twitch which is kind of like a huge endeavor but what they're doing is they're giving streamers these contracts that i kicked the tires on this to figure out if it was real because they gave see who's one of the top twitch is like a reported two year hundred million dollar contract what so that means that this guy's making more than lebron james playing for the lakers this year like per year that that would be the the deal and same thing and and crazier than that is that he doesn't have to he doesn't have to stop sharing on twitch he can still stream on twitch right and so when you first hear this this sounds crazy it's like you signed a non exclusive hundred million dollar deal for some kid in his bedroom playing video games that sounds insane and then they did that with a bunch of other streamers so it's a bunch of other streamers are also making you know ten million twenty million thirty million dollars a year to stream on kick right now and the big question is will this strategy work you know we'll kick become a thing will it just die will this give stake a bunch of customers or is this how new is is the website because kicked dot com according to similar web has like a hundred and fifty million monthly unique already yeah so this has been going for how long like six to eight months maybe yeah like within this year basically they've been they've been doing this and how did they get that much traffic that fast i mean that's one of the faster growing websites out there yeah so so what happened here was two two toy streamers that when they banned gambling couldn't stream on twitch anymore because their brands were essentially built around steak which one was train rex but had a a really loyal following on twitch and then they also then signed aid in second and so train wreck and aiden agents started streaming on kick which drove a lot of people over that website and then the q c the like every everyone else that they started signing was just driving more and more traffic and it started to just become a thing of like anti twitch go to kick they'll also the the one thing to point out is ad revenue on twitch if you're if you're a partner on twitch used to be seventy thirty they brought it down to fifty fifty which sparked outrage on the internet and then kick came out and said we're gonna do ninety ten for everyone it doesn't matter if you're a partner or not we're gonna lose an incredible amount of money on the content business and just make sure that state dot com remains like the cash cow and so that's like the the big thing that they have against twitch is like they don't really care if they have a profitable streaming business or not but do they how do they find it how did they finance this entire thing and i thought sean that we had talked about these guys was it wasn't the founder of stake is it like a twenty eight or or back then we i think we were talking about a year ago it was like a twenty six year old guy who bought like a fifty million dollar mansion in australia are the is it still like a bunch of young guy doing this without financing i mean not without financing the financing is stakes i mean outside finance and eight hundred had like an eight hundred million dollar dividend last year the last saying like that business is just ultra ultra profitable and so their competitive advantage is basically that they they're like reset their business model is not ads on kick or subscription cut it's can we funnel these users to come gamble on our in our casino and we have a casino twitch doesn't have a casino that's the bet that they're making the other thing that i because i tweeted this aisle was like i said this thing is fishy i said they're paying uc a hundred million dollars for two years of non exclusive streaming are they a lying b is this like incentive based or some like tiered like you us some some like stock deal they're in inflated the value of the stock or something like that to make the number set the headline number sound really big are they just laundering money is that what this is like what what is going on here and basically it was here's the default here's what the the the answer was basically it's a combination of cash and equity so their equity part might go to zero so that that part of the deal might might go to zero or it has incentives where it's like it's based on the number of customers you bring over and the second part is that the non inclusive part is basically so that he could just like funnel traffic from twitch to kick so if he just turned off like what this is like a big deal like when microsoft poach ninja from twitch he had to stop streaming on twitch that day and like go stream on the other platform and so most of people on twitch are just like kinda like out outside out of mind yeah know some people followed them over there to check it out but like ultimately their habit was still built on twitch what these guys are doing is different he streams on twitch and he says i'm gonna finish my stream or i'm gonna like play the big game over on kick and then he just like it's like a a call to action it just funnels a bunch of traffic over over and over when i was at twitch we did the same thing when we were losing foothold in one market in brazil we acquired this huge youtube streamer and i was like and they were and it was an exclusive deal but he started streaming on youtube while he was streaming on twitch and i was at first people in the company were like y what the hell man you just spent all this money millions of dollars of like signing the streamer and he's still streaming on youtube over there for free like what's the deal i was like actually wait this is probably excellent because all we have to do is just get him to like block part of the screen or like end his like do a cliff angle and be like i'm finishing this over at twitch and he'll just keep bringing traffic over and that's what he did we just basically let him violate his deal because we realized actually he was smarter than us that was a better funnel for us than than an exclusive deal would have been that's insane reid what these i imagine you've talked to these or you know these state guys as well are is this like a sam bacon freed type of company where they're or an f t company where there's like a bunch of crazy young kids or is this like a dialed in thing what what are these guys like i don't know them well enough honestly to know if it's like gonna become a problem i would say that from my conversations with them they seem like they have the thing under control it's generating a lot of cash i f x thing i company wasn't generating any cash in bitcoin went down it was like just completely fell apart but i don't mean is it a scam but i mean like young people just being wild you know like imagine a twenty seven year old make an eight hundred million dollar dividend just like a a a wild child type of setup up i haven't seen that from them but it seems like they're a little bit more laid back in australia don't really communicate with a lot of people so i i haven't seen that behavior i mean i could change i'm just i and i know i know way too much about the deal structures and everything else and how this stuff works but i i would i'm pretty confident and kick over at least the next couple of years we'll see where this goes if they continue to wanna do that business i i'd imagine stake is gonna just continue to get so big that maybe kick eventually becomes a distraction i don't know but i i would say they'll double down on steak dot u us over the next like eighteen months is as like states open up and allow them to start doing this that's insane hey there was also in a secondary business called rub as well that was essentially the the steak dot com competitor i'm not a hundred percent sure what happened to rub but it's still around and so there there is other businesses like steak steak just completely won because they were able to sign the biggest creators like train they saw drake which you guys said so at the at the moment it's a runaway train they're kinda taking all the market share and one of your other podcasts you'd mentioned how you're like well a lot of creators they think well i have an audience i'm gonna launch this product and you're like well that can work for a couple months but if you do a good job this turns into a proper company and the real challenge you you were saying the real challenge that i'm in is finding amazing executives to actually run the companies and build these into real companies you said for feasible i think you said you had the president of rx bar to come and be the ceo for the burger business or the restaurant business you partnered with someone and you also it sounds like had a present or ceo of that company what type of deals are you striking with some of these ceos to make it worth their while to to to do this yeah thankfully a lot of them realize the opportunity when they come into these businesses they know that there's an unfair advantage in go to market because the creator has hopefully built this massive platform already that gives them instant distribution and just consumers and so a lot of the people that we interview for ceos are actually incredibly excited about the opportunity and are willing to leave their big job at pepsi or wherever that is and so how the how the deals are really structured is very similar to any other business so you you have like the a cash basis that you're paying them and then you also negotiate some piece of equity over of like a four year vest schedule and so we we've had a lot of success doing that but for the most part we usually don't have to explain the competitive advantage to the business like when we start meeting these individuals they already know they've seen it they saw it with prime they're seeing the feasible they've seen it with happy to a lot of the individuals that were interviewing already no and so it makes it a little bit easier for us to get them to leave that specific job but it's it's structured very similar to like what a a ceo would potentially make if they came in and ramp start up and are you funding the company with a bit we fund up to a certain amount what's that amount usually it honestly depends on the business i would say it falls anywhere between the two fifty two fifty on the low end a million on the high end so feasible do you fund that that that's our with just a million bucks you think yep the the the the big issue with feast was and this is the issue or now having with some of our consumer products is retailers instead of so if you if you started the chips business or whatever and you didn't have a creator attached to it or anyone attached to it they give you gave you an unfair advantage on go to market you would go to a retailer and they would say we wanna test you in a hundred stores or we wanna test you in two hundred stores and from a cost perspective to to fund the po wouldn't be that like it wouldn't put that much strain on the business the issue that we had with festivals was walmart was willing to put us in all twenty six hundred and fifty store or forty six hundred and fifty stores it right when we launched and so that's becoming the issue with some of these businesses is that how do you fund the po of six seven eight million dollars right out of the gate to meet that retail demand and so that's the one that we've we've had to either raise capital go beg a bank to give us the money as like po as like a po loan and so that that's kind of the issue that we've run into and festivals like we raised a small amount of capital and it was really just to fund the four million chocolate hours that we ended up selling in season one that sold out and i think it was forty five days that was the biggest cash constraint to the business let's let's talk a little bit about prime so prime seems to be just taken over i it really really impressive i don't know how much we've talked about it on here before but can you just explain what's going on with prime in a way that would for somebody who's kinda out of the loop or maybe you know vaguely heard of it but it doesn't really truly appreciate like the the extent it's it's what it's doing yep so if you don't know what prime is prime is a hydration drink that was started by a logan paul who many people are probably familiar with and then k who is based on the uk but i would say the most popular creator to ever come out of that region and so you know they very notably like boxed against each other multiple times they were enemies and the story was that i'm coming together to start this business and the the company that they partnered with actually made an energy drink called lan new that's actually i mean you see it next to prime i think in every grocery store retail chain i go into it's like prime sits here lan new sits right next to it and so the founders of basically created this drink that they had called prime and logan paul and k came in really is just the marketing and they don't do anything operationally for the business they really just marketed it and it it became a like a cloud piece to hold a bottle of prime like now these ten twelve thirteen year old kids have to have it they have to drink it and we've seen some of the i mean that i saw an article about people saying the fda needs to go regulate this business because it has too much caffeine in the energy drink so now now there's just a lot of stuff going on about the company but it's grown an incredible amount i think i i can't remember what logan said on one of his podcast podcasts but i think they did forty five million dollars in revenue in january of this year and that was that was the last thing that i've seen them say publicly about the business i think he said if i remember correctly sean we talked about it i might have been six months ago i think he said like two hundred million for the year is that right yeah that's the number that's one number we had heard but forty five million obviously would put them on a totally different trajectory than that so yeah it appears to be just a absolute monster how do who's who's the logan paul's manager who's who's his right his name's jeff i he's he he's on the podcast he's been the same manager for a long time logan talks about them quite a bit and so if you if you watch some logan's older videos too he would periodically show up and so they've been together for a long time and jeff put together that deal and it's been incredibly successful we'll we'll see how it ends up i i don't know i would imagine they're gonna wanna continue to do this thing for another couple of years and then probably sell it and those guys who created the drink you said they created new but that wasn't that big like it seemed i remember when prime first came i was like who are these guys and it's i think it's too dudes right who are the founders of that yeah and the they didn't really have a huge hit before that how did they even secure that deal and why why did they partner with them over like you know some more established thing do you know i honestly don't know i've never had that conversation with jeff of of why did why partner with this company instead of doing yourself i think i i would imagine what happened was this company presented them with the opportunity and it was something that really resonated with logan and then i remember the story of him saying he called k and tried to get him on board which he did and so it it probably was just right place right time logan was ready to lean into something else i'm logan's at a lot of different business ventures over the last five years i mean this one obviously is far beyond the most successful but i again i would imagine right place right time they like the product like that got along with the individuals who are operating the business and the the partnering with k where they just actually friends the whole time and the whole box thing was just you know just a sort of front of me thing or like because that's kind of a genius move right like you kinda have to give credit to be like you know what will make this even bigger because normally let's say you're one of the biggest youtubers those people tend to have like a bit of an ego i am distribution i don't need anybody else to do this don't need to split the pie especially with my enemy so that's kinda interesting well what's going on there no total no they did not like each other the boxing beef was real they were definitely enemies and from my understanding of the story and i've i've only heard logan side of this i haven't heard k speak about it it took a lot of convincing for logan to get k on board because there was still a lot of an between their relationship there i mean a lot of stuff was set a lot of personal things were said about yeah girlfriends and parents and i mean there it was a very personal beef that went on in this youtube space for a while and so i think that's why i was so surprising when those two came together to launch prime because it was the last two individuals you would ever thought to partner together on a right he said mike pokemon was a psa eight it was kinda ugly yeah yeah but now it's like for for us it's it's been helpful because you know we they launched in australia and it went incredibly well for them they launched in the uk it went very well and so feast was like we're probably six to eight months behind because they you know had a product and launched a lot sooner than we did but it's it's allowed us to then go into those conversations in australia uk southeast asia where and they the retailers have already had massive success with prime where it's a it's a much easier conversation for us to explain to them why they should take feasible where i think if we were the first ones coming into the the in the industry like into wool ease it in australia probably a little harder conversation pre prime well and that prime seems like an amazing category like that to me the drink the hydration drink water basically like fancy water is a better category than chocolate bars how do you think about categories that you're gonna go into like yeah do you think that's a better category and and also like how do you choose what category did to you is you could basically promote anything dude when we we we we did the thing with the sean organized organizers this thing and he brought a bunch of festivals i ate about eight of those things in one night i was i felt horrible the that i i did eat dinner i just ate all this chocolate so it yeah at least for that night it felt like a good category yeah well okay see i have to backups just to explain how this all started and so you know this started with i you know in know a parking lot kind of brainstorming ideas while he was it was in between him filming this video that never got posted like most videos they like just got filmed and and never people never saw but anyway we we came up with this idea where we wanted to launch a snacks company and we wanted to build this content idea around launching the snacks company and cha bars to us felt like the right category for a couple reasons like one is it's a massive business like it's a twenty six billion dollar industry it's it's very holiday seasonal dependent which with your parent going into a store for halloween or for easter or something like that and it's like hershey's is sitting here and feast is sitting here and you have a eight nine ten twelve year old song daughter like to no brainer like you're gonna buy the feasible chocolate and so that that was one reason another thing is the fiftieth anniversary of willy won was in twenty twenty one and so the initial idea was let's put golden tickets in chocolate bars and sell that and give a chocolate factory which became just a thing in itself of you know buying a warehouse and turning into a chocolate factory was no easy feat but that that really kinda sparked the conversation of okay well if we're gonna build this on this chocolate factory giveaway with a chocolate bar what are the other categories that we can eventually go into the the cookie really came because you know had this joke on his channel and it's been since the beginning is you guys see it in the banner it's like subscribe and i'll give you a cookie and so we we wanted to venture into cookies next it's it's not i would say as big of a focus for us as chocolate i think we're really trying to build out seasonality in chocolate we're trying to build multi pack and chocolate i don't think people truly understand how big hershey's actually is and how dominant they are in the space like they truly dominate chocolate because they also own reese's receipts which is like if you walk into chocolate island and walmart target k wherever you see a giant wall of orange and a giant wall brett it's like you very clearly those two businesses so those two brands dominate the cha aisle and so we thought it was a good space for us to go at because it wasn't it wasn't so overs saturated by twenty thirty forty different companies is like we really knew who we were competing against we're like we're competing against we need to be more innovative we need to build this gamification layer we need to build a better product that has higher quality ingredients we we we knew like what the the road roadmap looks like to compete with them it's been a lot harder than we thought just global chocolate supply chain i think was something jimmy and i knew nothing about thank god for our team that like understands this that we've been working with but yeah i think we'll we'll definitely go i know jimmy said anything to you guys when you're in greenville but i mean there's a road roadmap of products that we're gonna do over the next like two to three years we're trying to figure out like what the rollout strategy is gonna be but for twenty twenty three and going to twenty twenty four chocolate is the main priority raw in getting more space in retail i gotta take back what i said i think it's a great category right you convinced me i was wrong that was great actually i think what you guys are doing is really smart there by the way hershey's makes like eight or nine billion a year in revenue off of the and the reason i think it's a great category actually based on what you said was the audience fit but also just like how old that competition is and like you know you didn't say this but like if i'm mars or i'm mon or i'm hershey's you know i look at my acquisition targets my m and a targets is not many and i think this is an opportunity where i don't think the business itself is gonna generate a ton of profit just because physical goods and you know they're like as you scale up it's like you know it's not the the thickest margins but i do think this is like a business where you're gonna look up and sell it for five hundred million dollars or something like that someday if you wanted to yep i take that it's you'd actually be surprised the chocolate actually is a it's a pretty good margin business for us and i mean hershey is still you know they probably churn off six to eight hundred million dollars in profit every single year and have been doing this for fifty plus years and so we yeah it's it's it's been challenging for us but we understand like what the roadmap is we really think that and we don't know how hershey is gonna compete with us seasonally that's like one thing big for us like halloween is gonna be big for us this year we're doing a lot of different sweep space and promotional things and so you know for us if we can win those months like october then becomes a hundred to two hundred million dollars just in a single month and we can put our full force into just october and then the holiday and then you turn it around and you're like okay now like what are we doing for valentine's today what are we doing for easter and so these are all like the conversations that we've been having over last year what number would kinda cross the threshold of alright we should take this acquisition seriously if one of those guys came to at the end of the year i don't think he takes a multi billion dollar acquisition right now there's just too much upside in the business right now just for feasible yeah there it's just it's the amount of opportunity for us not not only okay let's just just i'm just talking domestically so now let's just let's talk about just the world right childhood is is popular like globally and we haven't really talked about this yet but i know he talked about it in your guys podcast podcasts is we launch all these multi language channels there's there's really a method to the madness here is like you know we now dub in i think sixteen different languages including japanese and french and hindi those are all markets for us that we're pushing into over the next like twelve to eighteen months and so the opportunity for us is just way too big to even look at an acquisition at the moment because for us like asia is is a huge market the middle east is actually become one of our highest growing markets at the moment which we're now figuring out like what are the points of distribution and then we're eventually gonna be able to just specifically market to those regions like we're gonna be able to put a video file up and it's gonna be the japanese dub but instead of being like hey go to your local walmart and target it's gonna be like our our our dub artists in japanese which is the voice actor of na russo saying oh you can go by at your local seven eleven or other convenience stores available in japan so we're gonna make everything very localized and so to us like we're like not haven't even rounded first base yet to what this business opportunity is and so i know we haven't even had like acquisition target like isn't even a thing small when we when we all hung out with him he was talking about he was talking to the same thing i don't know if he was saying feasible but just like his enterprise you know he threw around crazy ideas of like maybe ipo maybe sell for billions of dollars i don't know like but he approached it in a this isn't an insult but it was very naive like he sounded like in innocent like oh i'm just gonna do this and then this and then this that's it like it's it's gonna work and i remember but but i but i found it to be like believable a like i believe that he actually could potentially do that which is crazy but b i felt like his ignorance a little bit about business was actually a massive tool for him a little bit where where i was like man that's like you'd be one of the biggest things in the world and in his brain he's like well yeah what do you what do you expect and i don't know if that's the maybe naive is not the right word but it there was almost an innocence about it that i i really appreciate do you think you have that same kind of mindset with this or or do are half the things that you guys are working on not just you and him but your rest of your artists or the rest of your folks on your team are you like i don't know if we could pull this off but whatever let's just try and get into it we'll see what happens i he's probably we're we're a little bit different in that regard i think i'm a little bit more of a realist in terms of you know knowing how hard these things are to build knowing how hard these things are to sell like i said ultimately it's gonna be his decision you know if he wants to sell this thing or not but i i think there there is a level of m and i are very naive to to at least when we enter the chocolate arena we didn't really have a good understanding of what we needed to create how we needed to compete and i actually think that was an advantage for us because we were just running as fast as possible trying to get product out and we made a lot of critical i would say decisions that were either big positives or big negatives and we were able to go change the negatives very quickly i think one is i think you said you you didn't even have customer support the day you launched or something like that we didn't have customer support in which we then learned in feast is was like okay and a little different business so we we had a full customer social support team when we launched feast thankfully and you you know you've done a couple of these now and i think i've always been amazed like some creators are much better promoter than others and it's not just like it it matters like in a couple different ways sometimes if your brand is like i'm super real and authentic anytime you're say anything promotional to the audience is like you know sellout out you know you can't do that and other people whose brand is to be more of a spectacle or more interesting they can get away with a little more but there's also just the creators motivation so as brands throw money at creators to you know tell people hey swipe up and do this hey swipe up and do this you know like at some point i think everybody becomes a little numb to the audience and the creator what i've been impressed with is for something like feast or i also felt this way with prime i felt like with prime logan paul is like the cmo and he's like he's looking for every edge he's got almost you like i don't think they own the majority of the company i think they own a a a small minority in that company but he almost treats it like a majority owner i remember when he went to like he goes to like you know the wwe thing or u c fight he's got his prime bottle with him and then he'll do something that he knows is gonna he'll like embarrass himself so he gets meme like a million times on instagram but he's like yeah i got me but i was holding i holding prime wasn't i he's like you know basically it was all intentional he's like looking for these little edges and that's very different than you know the old days when you know an influencer holds up some detox tea and just says you know i try this what do you think is the difference in buy in and that kinda like that mindset of like i'm going to use my engine to promote this like to level one hundred what have you seen is the difference there and and how does that happen yeah i mean there's also just a different level of excitement when you have ownership in the brand versus you don't whereas like there's a cash exchange for you to promote audible dot com you're not gonna be as excited you're not gonna put as much time creatively to this atlas just say ad read that you will if you own the the business and so i i actually first saw this which we did figure on the app i'd seen them do a lot of like we done a lot of mobile integrations on the channel and then when we did finger on the app is our thing we owned it it was like our competition explain what it is for somebody doesn't figure on the app was we created this mobile game where a person puts their finger on their cell phone and the last person take the finger off the phone went one a hundred grand and there's little bombs that would pop up so you would have to like move your thumb around to just avoid objects that would pop on your phone it ended end up blasting seventy two hours and then someone one a hundred k but level of excitement and level of promotion just went to the next level he was you know telling people why they should download it and he was you know messaging people back on twitter who was like hey i just downloaded i'm ready for the game he was responding and so there's like a a much there's much more depth to the level of excitement on the creator side and you really see that with prime and do to with festivals and you see it with also happy dad with nell they're going all in on happy to dad the podcast is essentially built around you know happy dad is everywhere for each podcast episode and i i do think the future is creator starting businesses the issue is like most of the time it's just gonna happen at the top where you know we're we are seeing some interesting businesses for like a mid tier creator who maybe is it to the level of logan paul or no but they're you know cars versus bids or something like that where it's you know the channel maybe has two three million subscribers doing five hundred k video and they're gaining a lot of traction on that type of business what are some other examples like that in in the creator space in the creator space cool creator businesses that are not just like well i'm the most famous guy earth so whatever i say works you know what what are some like we had doug for carson and bids yeah what are some other examples like that there's one called rare candy it's with leon hart who's you know he's a a relatively large pokemon style creator and he has a marketplace where you can buy pokemon cards and do pokemon unboxing so it's it's similar to whatnot and how it it works but it's you know leon owns a a large piece of that business i i mean to go back to the top like i'm a chamberlain coffee i think it's another one like very organic or talks a lot about coffee and now i'm starting to see a lot of businesses pop up on the smaller end where it's maybe you have a a channel that washes windows right so it's like a tiktok creator who maybe it does through like washing a house or washing windows and they use it as like this pop of funnel in like a city where all these individual houses or all these people are not reaching out to be like all this person in austin i'll pay them four hundred dollars to come pressure a lot of those for pressure washing there's they're all over the place and the grass cutting like a lawn mowing yeah lawn mowing vending machines seeing a lot of like little small niche businesses getting built but i i think these businesses are much bigger than people think they are they're they're gaining like even in though the pressure washing like i'm meeting traders and they're making like twenty thirty thousand dollars a month just from pressure washing homes and then all of a sudden you know they hire two or three other people because the demand is so high for people you know booking them out to to clean their home that they start to hire employees and then it becomes a real business that once just started as like one tiktok video of them fresh washing pressure washing their own house are you from the midwest and i'm from north dakota you're the first person on the pod that says the says the word war like i do with an r i'm might i grew up forty miles from the canadian border so i'm probably just as canadian is american at point i get made fun of all the time for saying that word that way that i've embarrassed and say it but i just heard you say it are are there any companies or any creator businesses out there that are shockingly large that many people don't know about yeah so one that i was wildly impressed by that was much bigger than i initially thought was doorman so it's the largest scripted youtube channel on the internet and so it's it's all like it's daily uploading but it's long form scripted storytelling and so i i really didn't understand like how big of an operation that was and how many you know people and how many sets and just the sheer volume with content coming mean out of that business that that was one i was pretty surprised by and if you don't know what it is i remember when i first saw it i was like are people watching this and then i just had been paying attention it's slowly growing it's almost like the hallmark or lifetime channel but for like how do you spell it what is it da mann d a a r space m a n n he has eighteen point five million subscribers it's like it's there's like a lesson to be learned in like each episode is that right reid yep he used to do something completely different right like da was doing something completely different and then he he he pivoted into this he yep found found his footing and scripted storytelling on youtube more fast paced a little bit more light on the the scripted like storytelling aspect is it it's like more content volume i'm pretty sure this guy had a giant weed business before this makeup actually but i think he also had a weed business wife is also a influencer i think she has a makeup business yeah pretty sure guy ahead a cannabis of business i i don't know if i i got that right why why funny yeah we grow he started peter he's he started we grow it's sold high hydro phoenix and marketed for growing medical marijuana that's funny why why is this guy impressive to you read what what what's the behind the scenes information just the sheer like the sheer size of the production company you know people people say it they're like oh you can build you know production entities on top of youtube and creators or hiring employees you know it's like this is a good example of massive production entity built on youtube cash flow positive making money you know i think most people thought that you know you couldn't do scripted storytelling on youtube and actually make it a profitable business just because it didn't make sense with how the ad revenue works and how the splits worked and he's really figured it out and it's it's hard because you have to upload daily and you have to average two three four five million views per video to start making significant amount of money but they really figured it out on a large scale did they get the revenue up or did they get the expenses down what did they do different than you would have explained or what did they what what was the trick from what from what i've seen in the scripted space on youtube and and this is also like in the in like the streaming services scripted content is very expensive you know you you have writers on staff like it's usually long timelines lines they they figured out how to create content on a scripted basis much quicker and much more cost efficient where it's like da doing a lot of the writing they have a lot of just like part time talent that comes in periodically and axe and then they also just like figured out how to do this with their own sets so they're not renting space like they actually built their own sets in in in la and they're just just reusing the same sets i mean if you watch a lot of outdoor videos you'll see the school you'll see the the movie theater there's a there's like a gas station there's a lot of like staple sets that just continue to show up and they do a really good job just repurposing those sets that's amazing i can't believe i remember seeing this guy when who's was coming up i never heard a million years would have bet that this would have been a good one what what are what are some other businesses out there that you've seen that are just shockingly interesting so this wasn't it it's not a channel that's a business yet but i i stumbled upon it a couple of weeks ago it's called ryan hall yu and he was a former meteor and it's like a channel based on just what weather is happening across the country different things that you should know about like the hurricane season and how it's gonna affect the the like us the southeast and you know it's a i'd i'd seen channels try and do this in the past he's the first one that's gaining like tremendous traction and you can see it in the views per video you know it's like two three million views per video it's just on just talking about different weather patterns and this this is one that could i think become pretty interesting long term whether he decides to build something on top of that and i'm i'm guessing it's like a very minimal team it's probably him plus an editor what is he doing because weather so local people know do i care about the weather and toledo right unless there's a natural disaster like you know what do what do i care so how is he how is he doing this this is incredible more more of like the talking about just the whole the things that you should know about tornado or these are the most dangerous weather patterns of the year of the month so he talks more holistically about just the entire industry it's not really localized i mean i'm sure he could start local channels but that becomes a much smaller opportunity you have to you have to make these videos appeal to everyone and he's done it such a good job at that but the these type of like little niche channels that start to pull a tremendous amount of use pop up every single month on youtube i mean the vending machine one was something that i went down that rabbit and farming i went down the farming rabbit hole what what does the well what's the farming and vending machine ones yeah so farming cole corn star i'll i'll hit you with a few so millennial farmer is probably the one that i watch the most and i grew up on a farm and so it wasn't that interesting to me because i i know all the stuff that he's doing but for a normal person on the coast to as it doesn't know about you know cultivating or or anything like that i think it's it's really shame to them and so he's one that's it's more i think appeals more to an older crowd cole corn star is another one that probably appeals to a little bit younger demographic where it's a little bit more like ranks and things like that on the farm and then lauren farms female channel also kinda showing like in the in the daily aspect of just what do you do on a farm and so there there really is a space for all types of contact on the internet now that's why the the argument of the internet is so over saturated it's hard to break through as a creator like i just have never bought that argument because on tiktok and youtube shorts i'm seeing things that continue to break through on a weekly basis and then people are figuring out how to turn it into an actual channel that's profitable and we're seeing it with people like ryan all y'all who you know nobody would have ever thought that a channel about the weather it pull three million views of video but yet here he is doing a time and time to get well that kinda makes sense one of the comments on ryan ryan hall videos etcetera man the weather channel has really lost his way i'm so excited that ryan is is doing it this way and which is funny that someone like and that was actually the most voted comment which means a lot of people pay attention to the weather channel enough so to actually like wonder if it's lost its way or not so it kinda makes sense where you can just look at like what are like for example you could be like well court tv court tv has been around for or c span some of these things have been around forever you could go and look at what the revenue is you could see like what's interesting about them what's not interesting about them take a do spin so weather channels own by it's at the guy hollywood byron and allen i think he was an actor now he's like one of the richest black men in america he owns weather channel i think they still make like five hundred million dollar year in revenue so like a great business and we had we were friends with this guy named john who who was the president of buzzfeed and he told me he was like man if you look at cs msnbc they only have like fifty thousand concurrent visitors or viewers on their on on the channel but they make this much in revenue i'm gonna create that but for facebook live and he ended up launching cheddar and sold it for hundreds of millions of dollars and so like this is like a interesting strategy of just like looking like which channels have lived for fifty years and are doing good but they're just kinda like been doing the same thing over and over and over again for a while it's kind of an actually an interesting strategy totally agree like building a new weather channel i think is incredibly complex and complicated but he definitely has the type of distribution that could start that business i think then it's just like you would need to find a partner to help him probably execute that but yeah that that's i think why i found that the channel so interesting like i go to the weather channel i even have a widget on my iphone that like pops up from me it's like automated from the weather channel it gives me the weather every single day was like i would much rather download rhine all y'all widget they like gave me the portal much rather support that than the weather channel and so yeah i think there's a much there's a pretty interesting opportunity there for him you'd made a comment you said something like you would bet that youtube will be five times more valuable than any other platform combined in terms of value to from a creators point of view of the type of business you can build on top of it do you know more than i do but sean and i had made this argument like a year and a half or two years ago where we're like ben twitter's like happening in the tech field but there's not really like a a what's the kardashian lady the genre there's not like one of the gender persons who have like launched this like instagram business that became a billion dollar company off of twitter yet but we think that there's gonna be something there then sean was like yeah there's like the guys on the guy mafia on twitter there's like the strip mall guy there's like the storage guy and they're actually like raising a significant amount of investor money create some of these companies do you have you been playing around with twitter and seeing like some of the micro influencers and the the the major differences instead of like what you do which is more pop culture this is a little bit more b to b and and much older but have you paid attention to like twitter and played around with the idea of one of these folks whether it's like a sweaty startup our friend cuba who's got like four hundred thousand following about them building like pretty big companies in the back of twitter as opposed to youtube yeah i've seen it i'm actually not surprised because i've i've been pretty outspoken of social platform where do you build the most fan loyalty across social and i've seen that twitter is at the top of the pyramid in terms of fan loyalty like a a twitter follower that will comment on your tweets is much more valuable than a casual viewer on tiktok or instagram because usually like they actually care and so i think people are now starting to figure that out that oh twitter is actually incredibly valuable if you could start to traction and start to get people that that really engage it's also it's an older demographic where i think the one thing that youtube is really struggling with right now is you know yes there's people like ryan hall and there's people like millennial farmer who are appealing to maybe a twenty to thirty year old but there it's it's much more suited for an eight year old to watch content whereas twitter to me is like i spend most of my time on twitter the people that i meet on twitter like i would buy products from if if they actually promoted something and so i just think that twitter for me has been really interesting from just a fan loyalty perspective it's this the depth of the platform whereas instagram and tiktok to me have been more casual i i buy things on instagram but it's rare and tiktok is like my mind shares like every single second i'm seeing a new video i don't even remember the names of the channels that i see on tiktok they just come and go like i and i when i'm at different events and i see a lot of tiktok creators i i recognize them because i've seen them on tiktok i have no idea what their tiktok channels are which is back but i will remember like someone's twitter at that i see and i'll be like oh my gosh that's at whatever it is i i'm very rarely do i say that about tiktok so i just think that the depth of consumers is just much different on twitter who would you buy a product from which of the quote twitter creators would you buy a product from or rather who are some of your favorite follows i mean i met blake robbins which we've you know did a podcast together i met him on twitter that was how we met i thought his tweets were incredibly interesting i thought as an investor he was talking about a lot of things that interests me and so if blake has sold anything three to four years ago before i knew him i would have instantly bought it because he had he had built up that you know loyalty i bet loyalty of like i not only agreed with a lot of things he was saying i thought it was really interesting to the point where i would take time to comment or like that tweet and i i have a lot of those now just that i follow on twitter and then i you get to like the of it that are getting hundreds of thousands of likes and i think you know now then you have the bots and you have a lot of internet trolls and stuff like that but where blake kinda sits is in the thirty forty thousand follower range and a lot of those people care about what he's say and then the the word of mouth becomes really interesting where someone says hey i use an eight sleep mattress it's changed my life if someone like blake or you guys tweet that i'm gonna be like what is an eight sleep mattress i should probably figure out why they like this so much but if someone on tiktok is like oh my eight sleep matches well well i probably just scroll past it and don't even think twice about it so that that to me is like something that i've noticed i tweeted out that i love aid sleep like i don't have any affiliate affiliation with them i just had one their mattresses and i tweeted out how much i loved it and then right away their team reached out like hey can we do an affiliate deal or do you ever wanna a partner together i'm like no man i just i'm just talking about cool shit and i like and so but they said they they said they they sold a lot of mattresses from that tweet yeah the people that follow you also can't afford the product they you know probably have been pho you for a long time they trust you say because you guys aren't shi a a ton of stuff constantly so when you authentically talk about our product like people pay attention so it's like tim totally right like i i i used to pay a lot of attention to what tim ferris was using and talking about on twitter are there any other good follow that that you have you you could see launching a business and succeeding i mean you guys mentioned some really good ones i it's it's not a a platform that i pay a lot of attention to in terms of individuals like that can grow businesses i think i'm i'm much more suited for youtube i live in the depths of youtube every single day twitter for me is like following people i know you guys as my friends like other people in the business here but we'll see i i hope they're able to grow businesses on top it i i have a lot of confidence in twitter just as a platform to grow loyalty what what about threads we didn't ask you about threads alright if you guys look at the google trends for threads it's not looking good i also saw a graph this morning on daily active users for threads that just like fill off it commented it's it's pretty i didn't have a lot of faith in it but we'll see i don't think that i i saw a lot of people talking about that and i think their takeaway is like oh it's not working or it failed but like that was always gonna happen even whether thread is gonna succeed or not if they got a hundred million people to download the app any app look at the twitter app will do the same if you get a hundred million people in a data to download the thing you're going to churn like you know eighty percent of them won't just start using the app regularly habit right away so so to me i see that and i'm like this is completely normal and like tam has no like that was gonna happen either way there there was no chance that a hundred million people are gonna download it and a hundred million people are gonna keep using it next week that's no app in the history of mankind ever has worked that way and so the question is like what happens i don't know three months from now once they get their kind of core base of users does that start growing or not and what would like yeah well there's no way to know until until then yep totally agree i i logged on i logged on the first day i downloaded it and have really good on since so i i there's also like you know you tell your talent to like keep an eye on it or would you tell your talent no we honestly don't care it's up to them most of them will download it and we'll post on it see if they like it i think we're we'll wait like you said it's gonna take months to figure out if this is gonna gain traction i think most of them are just gonna patiently wait i don't think any of our talent gonna fully into threats they're they're better off putting their time into making amazing youtube videos we did this video sean and i did this video like two weeks ago or a week ago where we were talking about how we liked that z did this and we were team z and sean we we officially have a new nickname i don't know if you saw this in the comments of youtube but we are officially now z cock that's plural both of us z z cock they call the z cock the t shirts are getting printed we should be alright i don't know like how we are his cock does that mean we are having sex with his wife or or is he having sex at all wife pg it's more like the mighty the mighty ducks it's like where the we're the mighty ducks we're this this this the small group of people who really believe in this thing that everybody else kinda it has written off or hates yeah but we're a cook so i don't know who's who's having sex with whose wife but something is happening there of which we are involved in we are officially execs cox which i'm okay with i i yeah i'm a z cock for sure see well once once they box or if fight mma like i'll be in elon side of the the octagon so maybe we'll well you really perfect so i will thank you a large a large sum of money that if that ever happens z would crush him i i guess i in terms of who would win i mean just looking at the pictures that mark posted with israel insomnia and vol it scares me a little bit if i'm elon musk but i still like i got support you so winter loose do you last couple of questions but what would you sell night media for right now i would i created night because i really enjoy it i what would i do if i sold night media i become an investor like i already get to do that so like like yeah but but there's there's always there's gotta be a number what do you think it's worth man i don't know to be honest it it all depends on how you value the subsidiary labs businesses is i mean i could probably i know what the core management company is worth and what this subsidiary business are i think is like where it could flex quite a bit but sure i enjoy it like i i think if i if i sold knight the acquiring business would have to make me the ceo like if we sold it to an agency like they would they would have to make me the the ceo of that major agency or management company because i i'd actually enjoyed doing this it's not something like i didn't start night media to sell night media i started media it says like i really enjoy what i really wanna do this i i find fulfillment in it i have a venture capital fund i get to invest i get to start businesses i get to be entrepreneurial i get to be a manager and i get all the perks of being a manager i i don't wanna do anything else right now that might change in a few years who knows like what time we'll do but yeah i don't know i i wouldn't sell we've had offers like i just wouldn't sell it so what what hundreds of millions of dollars i would assume low low i would north of hundreds of millions of dollars there's no chance to know that's that's wild that's a good that you're in a good position to be in right yeah i mean there's just i feel like we're i said this is on festivals i i feel this about the whole company in general as we haven't even got started it'd be hard for me to to sell this thing with the amount of upside that i see over the next like five years i i could see a partnership of some sort i don't think i could just fully sell it and walk away or have like in earn out over multiple years right now not yet well you raised a hundred million dollars or you received a hundred million dollars from churn in a separate fund to buy consumer businesses that you could then kinda like plug in youtube distribution into something like that i think that's the idea can you explain the big idea there and what if you've done anything with that yet yeah so labs will will start a business zero one feasible was started ground level race capital hire the ceo night capital is more fixated on finding a business that's generating cash that maybe is doing five ten fifteen million dollars a year and we think we can come in probably buy a majority stake in that business roll some creators or a celebrity onto the cat table and expand what that business is doing or just continue to grow that business it's it's very similar to what churn does and is doing with cars and bids and did with bar stool at hello sunshine and all these other businesses is yeah they've done that a tons of times yeah a massive opportunity for to do it as well just because we understand this creator ecosystem and just internet pop culture so much better than anyone else and so that ideally is like why why we did nike capital we're not in a hurry to to do a deal i think the economy's has been something that scared us a little bit and everyone that did deals in twenty twenty two i think he's really regretting a lot of those and so we're just patiently waiting for what that thing is gonna be well dude we appreciate you doing this you're the man it's always i i like just hearing and like what you're tinkering with you have a very interesting perspective on things what do you think sean yeah this was fun and i'm glad i don't know how well we stuck to our mission but i think it was pretty good yep it was pretty good we'll bleep out every mention because this is the zero cloud podcast zero cloud chasing podcast and we have no cloud policy we did not we did not wanna do that wait but do we have to use this face on a thumbnail no we're gonna blur it out i think we have to put like his face and then reed face next to it and blur out reed face and the thumbnail was like the man behind the scenes there's something ridiculous i'll i'll let you guys figured that one out i mean there's plenty of things no you gotta figure out we don't wanna how to do it we suck at youtube not we're suckers are killing it so no youtube is we have way more downloads on on like the actual podcast you know itunes and stuff like that we suck at youtube i mean i would argue that a listener on itunes or spotify is probably way more valuable than a single listener on youtube and the podcast genre so i i think what you guys are doing is incredible and i i would continue to focus on listens across other platforms i wouldn't like hedge to highly on youtube at the moment i agree that we've we've we like went hard on youtube for like the last twelve months and now it's like oh man actually the podcast number that just steadily grows every single week whereas youtube it's a little it's a little lumpy yep on the i love you too i think it's great i think i like the comments i guess i love it too but i i do think that i i consume your guys podcast podcasts on spotify so yeah so i guess that's what you get used to once wherever you consume it you're like this is a good place for things and so yeah yeah know that's where things go up alright read thanks for coming on that where should people follow you or find you shout up wherever you want people to i'm mean you spoke a lot about twitter so it's just reg jd on twitter and then i i i probably in the most active on instagram in terms of like answering messages so same thing jd on instagram so i appreciate you guys thanks for me here yeah i feel like got rude where know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a days off on a go less travel never looking back gotta