I spent eight years making Larry King's show. I think I know what happens to YouTube next.
For most of my twenties, my job was sitting across from one of the greatest talk show hosts who ever lived, figuring out how to get a real conversation out of a stranger, on camera, in one take, on a schedule that didn't care how the conversation was going. Larry King Now. Politicking with Larry King. Thousands of episodes. Emmy-winning stuff, and we weren’t precious about it. We shot it like a factory, because that's what a talk show actually is: a repeatable machine for turning a person and a chair into something people want to watch.
I haven't talked about that background much here, mostly because it felt like a past-life credential. A nice story, not obviously useful to a newsletter about running a video business today. I was wrong about that. It just became useful again.
Okay. Talk shows.
Here's the thing I can't stop noticing. Podcasting just got legitimized in a way that's easy to miss if you're not watching closely. The Golden Globes added a Best New Podcast category this year. That's not a niche platform update. That's the same stage as film and television deciding a format that used to be "two guys and a mic" is now awards-caliber entertainment. Netflix is licensing podcast IP outright. YouTube built a dedicated podcast tab. Apple expanded its video podcast tools. None of that happens for a format that's still experimental. That's infrastructure. That's a bet already being placed by people with a lot more data than either of us has.
But here's where I think almost everyone talking about this is collapsing two different things into one word.
A podcast, in the way most people are still making them, is audio-first. The video version, if there is one, is an afterthought bolted onto something designed to be listened to, not watched. You know the look: headphones on, condenser mic in frame, two people in a Zoom-call composition that happens to be recorded. I've never liked that format, even though I get why it exists and why it's worked on channels like ESPN for years. It just doesn't hold up as something built to be seen.
A talk show is a different animal. It's video-first from the ground up: presence, performance, a visual identity, multiple cameras actually earning their place in the frame. The audio version becomes the afterthought, not the other way around. Diary of a CEO. Call Her Daddy. Increasingly, even Colin and Samir, which started as industry commentary and has quietly become appointment-viewing talk TV. None of these are podcasts with a webcam turned on. They're shows.
And the reason this matters for anyone reading this, filmmaker, editor, solo creative, brand doing its own content, is that a talk show might be the single easiest television format for a person with almost no budget to actually produce. You don't need a soundstage. You need a room that looks intentional, real lighting, real audio, a couple of cameras, and a stream of guests. If you already run a podcast, you're already halfway there. You've solved the hardest part, which is getting people to sit down and talk to you on a schedule. You just haven't pointed a camera at it like it's the point.
There's a business case underneath the creative one, too, and it's the part I'd actually build a plan around. One 60-90 minute episode isn't one piece of content. It's raw material for fifteen or twenty short clips, ad reads, a newsletter issue like this one, social posts, a season's worth of sponsorship inventory. Short-form gets you discovered. Long-form is what makes people trust you enough to stick around, and trust compounds in a way virality never does.
Brands are already proving this works as more than a vanity project. Red Bull built Talking Bull around Formula One: exclusive access to drivers and engineers, extending a sponsorship relationship into something people watch for its own sake, not because it's an ad. Hot Ones is the clearest proof point I know of. Billions of views, a majority stake in the show's media company sold for $82.5 million, sponsorship and hot-sauce revenue stacked on top of a format that started as "person eats spicy wings, answers questions." That's not content. That's a media property with a P&L.
I don't think this window stays open long. Most brands are still spending their budget the old way: short bursts, rented attention, ad cycles that reset to zero every quarter. The ones who build a real recurring show now get to own something instead of renting it. I've helped build a few of these already, for LEGO, for Walmart, for the World Series of Poker, and the pattern is always the same. The format is unglamorous to set up and incredibly durable once it's running.
So that's where I'm pointing some of my own energy this quarter: figuring out what a low-budget, high-repeatability talk show actually looks like for someone without a network's budget behind them, and building it in front of you instead of just writing about it after the fact. I'll get things wrong in public. That's kind of the point of this newsletter now.
If you're already sitting on a podcast, or you've been circling the idea of one, I'd genuinely like to hear where you're stuck. Reply to this one. I read all of them.