Speaker 1
And sometimes the format is a very simple shift into saying we're
Speaker 3
going to make an interview, but during that interview, people eat really hot chicken wings. Well, no, no, we're going to make video really short and fast to consume, right?
Speaker 1
Yeah, well, I think that the latter has more.
Speaker 3
Is it dishonest? No, it's
Speaker 1
not dishonest. Look, everyone is going to have a Q&A format. Everyone is going to have an explainer format. And you dress these things up in different ways. For instance, like with hot ones, it's just a Q&A. It's the same thing. Like, I wanted to do a version of this in the standard cold plunge pool. You're in the plunge pool, the camera starting, and you do an interview. And obviously, the person gets increasingly uncomfortable and frozen in there. And ha ha ha. It's just an interview. Like, it's all the same stuff.
Speaker 3
Correct. But the gimmick sometimes, you know, hindsight is 20, 20. So the gimmick sometimes feels hokey or predictable. But for some reason, it just works. For some reason, you add a teaspoon of sugar in your tomato sauce and it tastes better. And yeah, whatever, it's just a spoon of sugar, but it works. And I think if we overly elaborate what a format needs to be, then you could miss out on a lot of these things that actually winners. Flack was essentially RRC. Fine. It just was the right thing at the right time. And I think oftentimes, the best formats for me are things that aren't actually overly elaborate and complicated. Yeah.
Speaker 1
Well, so they have to fit with the brain. The strength of Axios and the smart gravity was not the actual format. It's just bolded words and bullet points. But it was in service of their core differentiator, which was most New York Times story are 318 words of new information and 550 words of called B material. It's the hamburger helper. It's all the background stuff. They're like, we're just going to give you the shit you need to know. And we're going to put some big deal though, right? If you train
Speaker 1
No, no, I don't mean it in a bad way. It's not the bullets. It's
Speaker 2
the way you get you teach your company to tell stories and the expectation you set around that with the audience. Also, didn't you tell me to this week that I needed to kill my kittens? No. Wasn't that the line?
Speaker 1
I don't literally mean Harry and safe. No, but what
Speaker 2
you told me I'd drone on. I told you you
Speaker 1
have to drown your kittens, drown their kittens. Yes, that's cutting the stuff that you're in love with because you wrote
