Does Anybody Know Anything About AI?

How

much structural work does it take to go from a successful digital publication, but still a more conventional publication, you know, podcast and print, into streaming? Like, is it a lot of work to adapt, or did you already kind of have most of the infrastructure and it wasn't that big a deal? How does that go?

The only infrastructure that we really had was the... which was we had the reporters.

Which is the hard part.

That's often the hardest part.

But we had to build a video operation from the ground up from zero.

Did you have

to kind of convince and pitch Jessica to invest in that? She was pretty sold on the idea from the start, which was exciting.

Jessica, by the way, Jessica Larson, who is the legendary founder of the information.

And, you know, what was great was that when we decided we were doing it, we went pretty quickly on it.

We stood up this show, I think, in about three and a half weeks, which, fine, anyone can launch a podcast in three and a half weeks, but a daily show with four segments, that's 20 guests a week.

You can rely on your reporters for some of it, although at the start we were sort of banking on this idea that the guests would repost our stuff, and so we sort of over-indexed on guests.

You know...

At the start, it was just me.

I was booking it all on my own.

I was researching, anchoring, producing, and we grew our team over time, which has helped us scale.

I think the most telling part about it is that one thing that we've done in one month has not worked the next, and so we're always changing what clips we're using.

How much of your original

assumptions turned out to be right, and how many do you think were like, wow, I can't believe I thought that?

I think the main assumption that we made was that our reporting would carry.

And that is, I would say, one of the only things that has held because distribution changes all the time, whether or not it's short form, whether it's long form, whether you're prioritizing audio, whether the titles are different, thumbnails are different.

So the content has held.

Distribution changes week to week.

I would say, but we get to run experiments too.

When you say

How

much structural work does it take to go from a successful digital publication, but still a more conventional publication, you know, podcast and print, into streaming? Like, is it a lot of work to adapt, or did you already kind of have most of the infrastructure and it wasn't that big a deal? How does that go?

The only infrastructure that we really had was the... which was we had the reporters.

Which is the hard part.

That's often the hardest part.

But we had to build a video operation from the ground up from zero.

Did you have

to kind of convince and pitch Jessica to invest in that? She was pretty sold on the idea from the start, which was exciting.

Jessica, by the way, Jessica Larson, who is the legendary founder of the information.

And, you know, what was great was that when we decided we were doing it, we went pretty quickly on it.

We stood up this show, I think, in about three and a half weeks, which, fine, anyone can launch a podcast in three and a half weeks, but a daily show with four segments, that's 20 guests a week.

You can rely on your reporters for some of it, although at the start we were sort of banking on this idea that the guests would repost our stuff, and so we sort of over-indexed on guests.

You know...

At the start, it was just me.

I was booking it all on my own.

I was researching, anchoring, producing, and we grew our team over time, which has helped us scale.

I think the most telling part about it is that one thing that we've done in one month has not worked the next, and so we're always changing what clips we're using.

How much of your original

assumptions turned out to be right, and how many do you think were like, wow, I can't believe I thought that?

I think the main assumption that we made was that our reporting would carry.

And that is, I would say, one of the only things that has held because distribution changes all the time, whether or not it's short form, whether it's long form, whether you're prioritizing audio, whether the titles are different, thumbnails are different.

So the content has held.

Distribution changes week to week.

I would say, but we get to run experiments too.

When you say