The story
I’ve lived the story of podcasting.
The podcast is the contemporary late-night variety show. I know, because I started in late night and I've followed the audience through every screen it moved to since.
Joe Bolter
The lineage
Podcasting is late night's descendant.
01
I started in Network Television.
I came up through The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson and produced NBC's Red Nose Day live special. The network era, live, in front of an audience.
02
I followed it to Cable.
I EP'd Join or Die on History, and produced and wrote stand-up specials for EPIX.
03
And I followed it to Streaming & YouTube, where it lives now.
I EP'd Hobo Fabulous for Amazon Prime, then Netflix hired me to run their SiriusXM channel, a daily flagship with 1,200+ episodes, and I run it today. Tom Papa hired me to double his audience across audio and YouTube.
Same job. Four screens.
What changed
The standards are still high. The rules are different.
01
It only takes a camera.
It can be a phone. It can also be something Netflix would approve of, and honestly it probably should be, because this content is going to the big studios now. That's the whole barrier. A camera and an audience. A comedian who has both has a direct line to the people who like what they do, can make money from it, and keeps full creative control.
02
And the comedian is also the network.
When I started in late night we made a show for CBS. CBS got the ratings, CBS made the commercials, CBS worried about all of that. We made the show, and that was the deal. That deal is gone. Now the comedian is CBS. So somebody has to care about ratings, and thumbnails, and the social push behind the thing, and how the algorithms actually work, and which platform this particular show belongs on, and what the numbers are saying week to week. No performer wants to think about any of that, and I don't blame them for a second.
I’ll be honest, that part scared me when I first moved into it. Now I really love it, and it turned out to be the part I’m best at.
Why now
Momentum is the thing worth protecting.
I heard Tom Segura say that losing momentum kills creativity. He said it on the Fox lot, announcing a deal where Fox finances his shows and they still go out on his own platforms, and I haven’t stopped thinking about it since. A comedian has an idea and is excited about it right now. In the old system that excitement goes into development and comes out a year and a half later, or it never comes out at all, and by then they’re a different person who wants to make a different thing. The creator world is the answer to that. It’s old school in the best possible way, and the idea gets made while it’s still the idea they wanted to make.
From idea to distribution
01
Develop
I find the show inside what a comedian already does. A simple sentence, not a high concept. A format built to be made every week, and built for social from the start.
02
Produce
Real producers and real production value, run end to end. The talent shows up and does the thing they're good at; the machinery is mine.
03
Grow
Audio and YouTube, clips and social, read against the analytics. The comedian is the network now, and this is the part of being the network nobody wants to think about. It’s the part I’m best at. Plus the brand partnerships that pay for it, when the show is ready for them.
What it costs
Most people spend way too much on production.
It isn’t carelessness, it’s that they don’t know what things cost. When somebody doesn’t know what something costs, they hand the whole production to a production company, get charged a lot more than they need to pay, and have no way to tell that’s what happened. I’ve done almost all of those jobs or I know how to do them, so I know what a thing genuinely needs to cost. At Netflix I handle as much of the production myself as I possibly can, for exactly that reason.
And if you're a brand
01
Come inside a show that exists
An integration into a show already running, with an audience already there. The show keeps its voice, which is the whole reason it works, and the brand is part of it.
02
Build a show that's yours
I develop and produce it with you, and you own it. The show belongs to the brand, and so does everything it makes: episodes, clips, the audience it builds.
Netflix wanted their stand-up specials marketed without advertising. I built them a channel: Netflix Is A Joke Radio.
Need to talk to me?
Showrunner. Producer. Director.