Creative Director Report 2022

I’ve been working with Glenn since Autumn of 2020.

When we started, The Glenn Show was one of the most successful programs on Robert Wright’s Bloggingheads.tv platform, but still just one of a few, without its own subscriber base or income stream. BhTV needed to optimize its spending, and I was tasked with making TGS profitable. By the end of 2021, we accomplished that goal, and we decided not to stop there.

In this post, I’m reporting on what we’ve accomplished in 2022, from the growth of the audience to the development of institutional relationships, from small changes to the packaging of the show to experiments with its content.

While I have the mic, I also want to thank Glenn for helping me in my project of using the revenue from my Substack to buy humanitarian aid for Ukrainian victims of the war. Thanks to his role as an intermediary, we’ve been able to donate >$3200 to this cause.

Here’s hoping that more of us will have as good a year in 2023 as The Glenn Show had in 2022.

Numbers 📈

We launched our own YouTube channel in October 2021, so it was still very young at the beginning of 2022.

Over this year, our videos have gathered around 2.7 million views, which racked up around 580 thousand of hours of watch time.

Our YouTube subscriber base has more than doubled. We began with 18.4K at the end of 2021, most of whom had previously been watching TGS on the BhTV channel. As of now, we have more than 45K subscribers.

On Substack, we had a little less than 15k subscribers on the first day of 2022, and 28.5k on the last one.

Figuring out the right way to make these channels grow is not easy. YouTube’s algorithms are mysterious and change all the time. But we’re tweaking things continuously, trying to glean from the data what works and what doesn’t.

Our thumbnails, for instance, have been evolving this whole time.

Recently, we started adding 30-second snippets of what’s to come to the beginning of each episode. Hopefully that will entice new viewers to watch further and subscribe to the channel.

We’ve developed a format and found theme music (“Chazzed” by justnormal) for the preroll that lets new viewers know about the Substack, our tithing initiative with the Woodson Center, and who next week’s guest is going to be.

Tithing ⛪

Starting in January, we’ve been donating 10% of our Substack revenue to the Woodson Center—or to “empowering black development,” as we put it in the preroll. This money goes to support various grassroots initiatives across the US that help positive change in African American communities to come from the ground up.

Glenn talked about this project with Bob Woodson himself and with Sylvia Bennet-Stone, the leader of Voices of Black Mothers United, one of the organizations that enjoys institutional support from the Woodson Center.

We will continue to donate to the Woodson Center in 2023, and we plan to have more conversations of this sort, giving the much-needed exposure to these worthy causes and deepening The Glenn Show’s social impact.

In-person tapings 📹

The inaugural video of the TGS YouTube channel was a special episode: The first Glenn and John conversation that was taped in person, using a high quality audio/video set-up.

We’ve built on that in 2022, publishing six more episodes that were taped in person:

• Two live gigs at NYC’s Comedy Cellar: 1, 2;

• A debate with Rick Wolff, moderated by LaJuan Loury;

• Two episodes at the Manhattan Studio in NYC: a debate on the ethics of black identity with Kmele Foster, Bob Woodson, and Shelby Steele, moderated by Reihan Salam; and a conversation with Substack’s co-founder, Hamish McKenzie;

• A meeting with Bob Woodson a Sylvia Bennett-Stone, the head of Black Mothers Voices United.

Two of these, the Comedy Cellar gigs, were the first ever episodes taped in front of a live audience.

We’ll do more of this in 2023.

What’s even more exciting is we’re starting to work on a home studio for Glenn. This will allow us to up the video quality of all TGS episodes and to occasionally host extended in-person conversations at Glenn’s home.

The Lab 🧪

We’ve done a lot of little creative experiments this year.

Glenn shared two brain teasers, accompanied by animations by me, and then solutions to them.

There were a couple of audio essays: “Call of the Tribe” (1, 2), and “The Ghost in the Machine.” (This is a genre we first stumbled upon in 2021, with “The Double Life.”)

There were passionate riffs on the recent news of developments in AI from China (I invite you to pay special attention to the closing riff, which sounds like poetry to me: “Glenn Loury Is Having a Terrible Thought.”)

In July, we published an anonymous letter on the dangers of online algorithms, which was revealed a week later to be written by AI. It sparked a great conversation and a certain amount of controversy.

Looking for ways to produce more content in-house and to expand the topical range of the show, we taped Glenn’s reaction to items submitted by staff: I played a few clips from Louis CK, and Mark Sussman described the ideas behind the effective altruism and longermism movements.

There was also an important and very successful experiment in content dissemination: for the month of May, we’ve published one very short clip on TikTok and YouTube Shorts every day. The most successful clip gathered more than 6.5 million views. We are now building on this further—more on that below.

The Manhattan Institute 🏢

Since August, the show has been sponsored by the Manhattan Institute—a conservative think tank, where Glenn is a Paulson Fellow now.

This gave us a higher degree of financial independence—the staff’s salaries are now paid by MI—and access to MI’s facilities. It’s in the MI studio that we recorded the outstanding debate on the “ethics of black identity” and the conversation with Hamish McKenzie.

We’ve also crossed an important threshold in the day-to-day operations of the organization: Thanks to the relationship with MI, we’ve been able to bring on board the first TGS intern, Glenn’s former student Maya Rackoff. She’s now making thumbnails for YouTube videos, short clips for Twitter, and has recently started to produce even shorter ones for Youtube Shorts and TikTok.

“My lovely wife” 👩🏾

Glenn’s wife LaJuan Loury has made her first appearances on the show this year: her voice can be heard in the prerolls of podcast episodes; she moderated Glenn’s debate with the Marxist economist Rick Wolff; and she shared her “Summer Lovin’” playlist as a gift to subscribers this Christmas.

Without promising anything, our whole team is looking forward to seeing more of LaJuan on the show. We have some very exciting ideas.

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I tried to keep this report concise. There’s much happening behind the scenes, and we have ambitious plans for 2023.

From all of us, thank you so much for your support and engagement. None of this would have been possible without you.

And Happy New Year!