Name: How a '90s MTV Game Show Host Built a Media Empire
Uploaded: 2016-04-01
Duration: 8 min 47 s
Description: Fortune goes inside Chris Hardwick’s Nerdist Industries.

Fortune goes inside Chris Hardwick’s Nerdist Industries.

How a '90s MTV Game Show Host Built a Media Empire

when I was young, comic cons were a safe space. You know, before we could kind of be public about the stuff that we were into without fear of getting judged or beaten up or whatever. Comic con is a safe space. I want notice to be a safe space. That's sort of the sort of a comic con iteration of approach to pop culture. And so MM notices a multimedia, multi platform digital network. We cover pop culture on the editorial side. We create video content. We have a YouTube channel with almost a million and a half. Subscribers were one of only a few of the original YouTube funded channels that's still standing and actually thrive. We do a daily news show called Nervous News with Jessica Kobach. We're talking game of Thrones and okay, go is here Puppet Dreams with Neil Patrick Harris. We made show with Weird Al. We have a podcast network of 49 shows. Everyone who works here is a big nerd and is a fan of the stuff that we're covering. Most of the editors have their own shows, so we have notice play with Malik Forte. If I think this game is Booty Butt cheeks. I'm going to tell you this game is Booty Butt Cheek. Because science is Kyle Hill looks at the sci fi and comic book stuff through science ones. How does Iron Man suit work? It's comedic. It's fun, silly. It's authentic. It's informative. It's nerdy, Sort of like Sim City. The goals have a perfectly functioning civilization. You know, we're just setting up little camp. We're setting up a camp in YouTube, you know, we're setting up a camp and twitch. We're setting up camp on nurse dot com and in podcasting on television and hopefully movies and then live events. And, you know, and we're just trying to create arteries that connect everything and feed off of each other and help each other grow to this larger aggregate organism. As a nerd, I am one of the luckiest guys in the universe. I get to come in here every day and work around people who are bigger nerd than I am and all aspects of the field. Having nerd culture be pop culture for all intensive purposes is good. Last year we got a Mad Max movie. We got a Star Wars movie. We got an Avengers movie. We got like we got so much good stop. Because of that. I was always obsessed with stand up comedy, and I knew I wanted to go into television or performing or something, and I started working for MTV in 1994. They had me BJ First Summer, and then in the fall we did a pilot for a show called Singled Out, Which was, I guess I can say in retrospect was sort of a cultural phenomenon from 95 to 98. Then I foraged for scraps from 98 to like 2000 and one in 2000 and seven was having a very intense existential crisis about my life and my work. And I was really tired of depending on some executive getting me or not or deciding if I was attractive enough for famous enough for this. Enough for that enough. That's when I realized that I was chasing trends, chasing what everyone else wanted, and I hadn't really ask myself, What do I want to do? So that's what I did, and it turned things around almost instantaneously. Instead of chasing everything. I was very, very, very focused, so I started nervous. It was just the computer at my desk in my home. I wasn't doing it for anyone other than me, and so I was passionate about it. The creative process is long and difficult, and it's it can be very unsexy because you're just trying stuff you don't know. The only reason that you would continue to do that and make something well is if you really genuinely cared about it and we're largely doing it for yourself, and that's kind of what we do here. Okay, notices a positive place. It's definitely a community. It's a place where we celebrate and champion the things that we love. Obviously, we are critical of the things that we love, but in a constructive way. The podcast operate pretty independently, but are always a part of the urgent voice. Call up two of my friends on a Thursday, Matt Meyer and Jonah Ray, and I said, I want to start a podcast this weekend, and I don't care if anyone listens to it. We're just gonna do it. It's gonna be for us if nothing else, we went over recorded on a Sunday. We put it up on a Monday and it's been going up ever since when you have such a strong point of view about what you want to do. And then you have this amazing team of actors. How collaborative is it with them, like, What are you taking to them and what are they bringing to you the most part? The script in the script, Um, and so we're all working from the same page. I think what I really pretty quickly is that podcasts are actually the most engaging form of media that there is. When you think about how someone listens to a podcast, they generally put it in their ears, so it's inside their head. I think 100,000 podcast listeners are worth a million TV viewers because people form real emotional attachments to them. You listen to a podcast during your lowest times during your highest times when you're at work. When you're in public transportation treadmill, it accompanies you, and you feel like you're a fly on the wall and you really attached to it the volume of really in depth conversations and understanding what people are like. Baron Getting Obama was huge for every podcaster podcasting, this thing a president would do. It's a renaissance of really solid quality entertainment. I never wanted to be like a business guy. You know, I'm like comedy and entertainment. I like making stuff. I just like, That's where my heart is. And so I partner with this guy named Peter 11 and mid to late 2011. He sort of took over the business stuff, and I was able to stay focused on the creative stuff, and we grew up. And in his company, geek chic daily. Thomas Tull was one of the investors. We were really growing very rapidly, and it seemed like, you know, I feel like we need We really need some infrastructure to scale up We need like we need like a more powerful exoskeletons here. Legendary is an entertainment studio, started out financing and producing motion pictures and over the last 10 years has gotten itself into a number of other businesses, such as that they're now in the television business. In the comic books business, Legendary was a big small company. The vibe of legendary was exactly what we were doing. It was fan driven content. They would love Godzilla's. They made a Godzilla movie you know, because Thomas is already involved. Just made sense. When I came in, Nervous was the only property that existed within legendary for the digital side of things. Over the next year, we acquired two other companies, one being Kikkan Sundry, which was Felicia Day's Digital Channel, and Amy Poehler's Smart Girls, which obviously is Amy Poehler's channel. Once we had all three of those together, it made sense to think about an umbrella organization that really comprised all of them. So at that point we created legendary digital networks, which is, in a sense, the holding company for all three of those channels and operates much more like a cable type business where you have multiple channels under the same brand, like a Viacom or discovery. So we've used that organization to basically consolidate some assets, scale up resources and provide a little bit more opportunities to each of those channels, and they can provide on their own the Wanda Group. They are primarily real estate company, as far as I know. Well over 100 and $20 billion valuation of the company owned the AMC theaters here in the U. S. Have a stake in some other theaters around the world, and I think exploring kind of their vision of how to expand on their media business globally. We're still in the process of figuring out exactly what that means for us. But we're looking forward to exploring what the opportunities might be created from the scope and reach of what they have to offer. Yeah, I don't know if notice is the future of how content is going to be produced as a whole. I mean, I know where I want to see us in the future. I'd rather have nervous be stronger than anyone platform because it's rapidly changing. We don't know what's going to happen in two years, three years, five years, how people are gonna be getting content. But if people see the Nerdist logo on anything, I want them to go. I know what that is, and I like that we don't do market research were part of our demographic, which I think is really important. We are in the demographic of the stuff we're making, and we just say, What do we like? What do we want to see? And what do we care about that is that's it. Mhm. Yeah,