What's The (Podcast) Strategy?

A very kind message from my friend Paul and his extra-ambitious daughter Madison has been rattling around in my head.

The core of the question is, “It sounds like you have 3 podcasts, but it feels like there are 30 - what’s the strategy here?!”

And I realized I could feel the answer, but should probably write it down.

(Also, if you want to understand why YouTube calls them “channels,” you should read this piece first - it'll make the rest of this make way more sense.)

So, Paul and Madison, here’s what’s going on with the 3 channels I’m currently contributing to, Excess Returns, Epsilon Theory, and of course, Cultish Creative.

On Excess Returns, far and away the most successful in terms of watch time and subscribers that I contribute to, my partners Jack Forehand and Justin Carbonneau were already scaling the channel when I joined them. The core insight to our growth in the past 2 years is pretty simple: the YouTube algorithm rewards volume, but you can't just repeat the same content over and over.

We saw plenty of other finance / financial education channels growing, but there was an undeniable staleness to so many of them. Yes, you had your parasocial relationships with the hosts, but especially once the same guests are getting rotated between channels with most of the same questions it’s - boring.

So we decided to start treating Excess Returns like a TV network. Instead of just host + guest interviews, we created a lineup of shows: we started with 2 Quants and a Planner, plugged in various clip shows, and more recently added The 100 Year Thinkers and Click Beta. Each serves a different depth/consumption need for the same core audience - people interested in investing and financial education.

A channel is a place an audience gets served something they expect. A show is a mechanism for delivering what they expect. Add some conversation, with variation, worthy of sharing, and - everybody wins.

That’s before you even scratch the network effects too. A guest like Bogumil Baranowski becomes a collaborator and co-host. He opens doors, we develop shows together, everyone's reach expands.

Excess Returns works because it meets a broad audience's wants in multiple formats, and it never feels stale to us because we're genuinely creating different shows, not just repackaging the same content.

Epsilon Theory operates on a different principle from Excess Returns. First off, the audience is less looking for investment education, and more interested in strategic analysis. That’s the brilliance of Ben Hunt and Rusty Guinn over the years.

Their audience is fascinated by not just what the stories and their implications are, but who is framing them and why. The strategic interest scales up, which we capture on the (currently paused) show Breaking News, where we broke down the entire election news cycle last year. And the strategic interest scales down to the human level.

As I learned hanging out online and in real life with a number of the community members, there is a seriously diverse audience of incredibly smart people here. They are all fascinated with how non-linear life is, especially around markets and politics, and therefore they’re hungry for meeting other individuals in the community and understanding where their mode of seeing the world evolved from.

The Intentional Investor is my personal profile style interview show to get those stories out, for that audience. It’s like How I Built This but for life, not the returns or the businesses themselves. If we weren’t capturing these stories, it doesn’t seem like anybody else would, at least at this level of detail.

There's also occasional content from Ben and Rusty that surfaces ideas that might otherwise stay behind paywalls - these aren't shows, per se, but they are a part of why people subscribe, so they have a home here too.

But here’s what changed recently. YouTube introduced its new collaboration feature that lets two channels post the same content without any of the old copyright or account-flagging risks. For what I’m about to describe, that timing matters.

First, Cultish Creative. My site operates on yet another principle relative to Excess Returns and Epsilon Theory. The audience here is the smallest of the three, but it’s the most intentional. They’re people who, for the most part, I am connecting one at a time.

Which, is crazy in a hyper scaling world, but think about this in context. Just Press Record is my show where I take two strangers that I think should meet, introduce them, and record the whole thing.

The audience for the channel is the guests. If other people watch, great, they might find two new, interesting people too, but if only the guests meet, I’m still delivering on my value proposition: connect interesting people and ideas.

Excess Returns is designed to reach a wide audience of people seeking investment education. Epsilon Theory is designed to reach a relatively narrower audience of people seeking nuanced strategic thinking examples, from people who also haven’t lost their humanity. Just Press Record exists on the margins of both shows - in that it is a little educational, is very strategic thinker focused, and is heavily humane.

Back to the collaboration feature now. Epsilon Theory and Cultish Creative want to go deeper into the personalities and personas and I have two unique channels to display that. On Epsilon Theory it’s through a traditional interview lens. On Cultish Creative you get my style + a stranger’s which adds a whole wildcard element you can’t get any other way.

The Collaboration tool allows us to manage each channel separately, but bleed over show content when there’s appeal, thus increasing volume (the original Excess Returns problem) and reach (everybody’s social media problem).

It’s a bonus that many of our Excess Returns guests also can be on the other shows too. Not all, but enough. And the awareness from having a somewhat popular channel act as proof too, which can’t be understated here.

My strategy is to figure out who an audience is, entertain them with something they mostly understand, expect, and respect, and then to cultivate shows worth sharing. I want to do it at three different scales. I want to educate, entertain, and maintain my humanity.

Is it working? I don’t need you to answer that. I know it is, just watch what I do with this next.