#499 - Cenk Uygur

Yeah, it's totally crazy. Thanks for saying all that. It's been a crazy, crazy ride. And I love doing a podcast here because it reminds me of how we started, and we literally started my living room, and we're about to hit, like, 2 billion views, and it's.

2 billion.

Yeah, it's madness.

What year did you start?

2002. We started doing sending in taped shows to Sirius satellite radio.

Wow.

We were actually Sirius's first original talk show.

That's incredible. So what was the thought process behind it? Like you just said, you know what? Nothing out there is representing my point of view. Let me just create something.

Yeah. Okay. So first, let me just quickly say thanks for having me on and thanks for being on. Never gone on anything tv, anything where people were more excited that I was going to come on someplace.

Really?

Yeah.

You're going on Joe Rogan's podcast? That's awesome. Well, we've spoken highly of you and your show many times on it, so thank you. There's a lot of people that are connected here.

Yeah, I appreciate that. So initially, for like, three and a half minutes, I was a lawyer, and I hated that. Couldn't stand it. So a friend of mine suggested I take, like, a course on how to start your own tv show. I was like, that's mental. You can't do that. Right? And so I went to a learning annex course in New York, and this lady just took our money and said, hey, schmucks, go to your local public access. You can start any show you like. Right? That's it. That was the whole thing. And so I was like, okay, I still don't believe it. I went to first day at the law firm. I left early to go to orientation at a public access station. Okay. And I went there, and you got to go through this whole process, get trained up, yada, yada. First time I go on air, we did an hour long show with me and my friends. Half of it was on politics, half of it was on philosophy, okay? Like, we had philosophical debates on God and all that stuff, and everybody else was bored to tears. I walked off the stage thinking, that's what I'm doing.

God, I love that.

I love that. That's what I'm doing the rest of my life.

Wow.

So I got started there, then got, like, barged my way into local radio. WRKO in Boston, WRC in Washington. Just weekends, fill in whatever they'd give me. I drive 9 hours to Boston to do weekend. Then. And then I went to Miami and got on tv. Same thing, like, bars my way in, started in sales, worked my way up, somehow got on air, somehow became the supervising producer of their flagship show and on air commentator, and then that got sold. That was Barry Diller's group. And then I came out to LA, and I started writing because my main job at the tv station had become head writer for the show. And so then I wrote on three different pilots here in LA, and I remember when the straw that broke the camel's back on that was, I was writing for Daisy Fuentes, and they're like, okay, now you need to use Daisy's voice. And I was like, I don't know what Daisy's fucking voice is. I don't know that at all. I've never met her, and I don't want to be Daisy's voice. I want to be my voice.

Right?

So I was like, I got to get back into radio because that's the only place they let you do a talk show. That's back in two, right? One, actually, at that time. And so I called up my old friends, one of them who was a program director at WRKO in Boston, who'd then gone to XM, he's like, jenk, dude, you got to go to Sirius right now. They just opened the door. Go, I'll put in a recommendation for you. And basically, like, bars my way in there. Started the Young Turks. What we know now is the Young Turks. I started with Ben, who was the anchor at the station in Miami that I was working with, and they literally didn't even know we were on the air for the first six months. And then when they found out, they're like, oh, shit, now we got to pay you.

They didn't know you were on the.

Air because some consultant had hired us. And then when they eventually hired a program director for talk because we were their first talk show, they didn't even have a program director for that. Then they hired one, and they're, oh, right, right. These guys are on the air. Okay, what should we do with them? And he had me go into New York and he sat me down and he listened to some tapes. He's like, you guys are surprisingly decent. All right, fuck it. We'll pay you. And that's how we got started.

Are you guys still on XM? Well, now it's Sirius and XM, right? Combined.

No. We were on there for a million years. But honestly, the video, online video got so much bigger than radio that it became not worth, like, even for the minor hassle of doing formatting, doing 3 hours, we're like, it's not worth it. So we just let it go.

Do you guys have a podcast version of it or an audible download version of it?

Yeah. So on iTunes, we got a free audio podcast and a free video podcast. That's like two out of the six segments we do every day so people can sample it. It's not bad, actually. That's already like probably more than a half an hour of content for free. And then if you're hardcore and you like the show, then you just go to our website, tytnetwork.com, and it's a $10 membership. And so then you get all of it. You get the main show, you get all the network shows, you get everything.

So if anybody wanted to, they can get plenty of free content. But you do so much stuff that if you want to be. So what percentage of the people that get to it and start downloading it, do you know what percentage actually sign up? You have a huge amount of subscribers, right?

So on YouTube, we have a little over one and a half million subscribers for the Young Turks, the flagship show for the whole network, we have, I think, about 3 million subscribers. When you have all of our shows, like pop, Trigger, what, the flick, which is movie reviews, TYT, sports, stuff like that. And we have 64 million views a month on the network, 24 million uniques every month. But when you're talking about people paying $10 a month, we almost never advertise it, which is so stupid of us, partly because we had troubles with the website and stuff. The people who pay the $10, that's around 4000 still, though.

Wow. It's amazing. So you've essentially set up your own studio, you have your own network. I mean, it's not just a show now. You have this entire thing that you've developed. You're only on some of those shows too, right? A gang of other people working for you now.

Yeah. So there's 29 channels. So if I was on all those shows, my head would explode. My head's about to explode as it is running the network and being on the show. And then for three years, I did tv at the same time, which was just so crazy, I was going to melt down. My body was breaking down. But, yeah, all those channels, great hosts. We got 30 people that are full time, but then if you add all the hosts that are not full time to it, then you're talking probably 50, 60 people.

That's insane.

Yeah. And we literally started in our living room, like when Jesus, who's still with us twelve years later, walked in as an intern, he was like, okay, there's like a 12% chance I'm getting murdered today. This is this guy's living room, and it's kind of scary looking, okay. And I can't believe he stuck with us, but he did. Now we got this big studio space in Culver City, and we're producing shows like there's no tomorrow.

Wow. And you guys, recently, did you use Kickstarter or something to fund your studio? How did you set that up? What did you do?

We did Indiegogo. So it's basically the same thing as Kickstarter, and we like it a little better. And we thought, all right, we need money to build the new studio because we had been with current television and they had paid our rent. I had this great deal with them where they paid me to be a host, they paid some of our producers, and they paid for the rent. Great deal. So when we left, they got bought by Al Jazeera, and we didn't want to be with Al Jazeera. So then we got to go build our own studio, which is incredibly expensive. So we're like, okay, let's try this. Because we built everything with our audience, let's try to build this with them. And I remember we sat around in a room, there was like six, seven of us, what should we go for? And every single person agreed, 150,000. Let's go for it. Let's go nuts. Let's try to get 150,000. So then it came back around to me and I was like, okay, that sounds good. We're going to go for 250 because I'd rather get to try for 250 and get to 175, right? And then people are like, oh, you didn't make it. I'm like, yeah, but I got an extra 25,000 I didn't expect, so that's awesome. I don't care what people say, as long as we can actually use the money to build a studio. Anyway, it turns out we got basically a little over $400,000.

Whoa, that's incredible. But that's just a sign that what you're doing resonates. So that's got to be very fulfilling. That's got to feel nice.

Yeah. So my dad is a guy who will focus on the positive for about a second and a half, and then he'll be like, okay, yeah, but let me tell you all the things that are going wrong and yada yada. So I've unfortunately internalized that. I mean, it's got a good aspect to it and a bad aspect, but. So I never take a moment to be like, yes, right, a