Mixed Signals: Adam Friedland on comedy, TV, and whether he’s the Joe Rogan of the left

Max Tani:
Welcome to Mixed Signals from Semafor Media where we are tracking the wild changes in this media age. I’m Max Tani, the media editor here at Semafor, and with me as always, of course, is our Editor-in-Chief Ben Smith.

Ben Smith:
Good to be here, Max.

Max Tani:
This week on the show we are sitting down with Adam Friedland. He is a comedian and the host of The Adam Friedland Show, which just released its new season on YouTube this week. We’re going to talk to him about why he’s reviving a 1960s-style television talk show for the internet. We’re going to ask him about what careers and comedy look like in 2025 and whether he is the long-awaited-for Joe Rogan of the left.

Ben Smith:
I think maybe we’re a little bit ahead of the curve with this one for once maybe.

Max Tani:
Maybe. I don’t know. I guess we’ll find out, but we’ll dig into all of that right after the break.

Ben Smith:
Max, I feel like we’ve been on a bit of a roll with this show lately. I keep hearing about what Chris Black said about gatekeepers being back, and I’m really looking forward to this episode with somebody who I am not sure how he fits into this. But Max, can you tell us about Adam Friedland?

Max Tani:
Yeah, I mean, this was one of those guests when I texted it to my friends to let him know that we were going to be having him on this week, they were extremely excited. Adam Friedland is a very popular, increasingly popular comedian on the internet. He was the co-host of a podcast whose name we’re a little bit squeamish about, but it’ll probably come up on here anyway, but he was for a long time kind of grouped in with this rising up-and-coming podcast that people on the internet called the Dirtbag Left, the Red Scares, the Chappo Trap Houses.
But actually, I feel like he’s had a lot more success and really broken out beyond that. And one of the reasons we wanted to talk to Adam and why I found him to be so interesting over the last few years is that it really seems like his stuff has started to both break into the mainstream, and he has also decided to veer in a direction that I don’t think we would’ve seen comedians do even five or 10 years ago. He’s doing his own show on YouTube that’s a pseudo late night, but also a long form interview and comedy show with some pretty increasingly famous guests.
He has a new season that’s coming out that’s going to have people on like Sarah Jessica Parker. He taped an episode with Ro Khanna, the congressman from California, who really wants to be president, and it really is a sign of just how much both his own show and his profile is raised as a comedian, but also the ways in which YouTube and podcasting have really changed the career arcs for comedians. It’s allowed a lot of comedians like Adam who may have been a little bit too weird or a little bit too edgy for some of the kind of main comedic institutions and kind of gatekeepers, it’s really allowed them to have another form of success and reach a lot of people. So we’re really excited and only minorly nervous about having Adam on the show today.

Ben Smith:
But I had not spent a lot of time watching his stuff before, but did over the weekend, and I’m excited for politicians who their staffers have told them, “You got to go on some podcasts for them to go on that one.” Some extremely awkward stuff.

Adam Friedland:
Do you think that you’re good at business because you’re Jewish, or do you see that as not playing any relation to that?

Dave Portnoy:
Zero relation.

Adam Friedland:
I’m really bad at business. A lot of people say you’re either a book Jew or a money Jew, and I’m illiterate and bad at money.

Dave Portnoy:
Comedians, that’s also a lane?

Adam Friedland:
Like from Seinfeld?

Dave Portnoy:
Well, Larry David, Seinfeld, like comedians.

Adam Friedland:
I thought you said Elaine.

Dave Portnoy:
No, no, no, no.

Adam Friedland:
Yeah, it’s the stupidest lane in the entire world.

Ben Smith:
It’s a new kind of career arc and it is interesting the extent to which comedy is now right at the center of American culture, and these characters like Bill Maher and Joe Rogan are these central figures, and so I’m very interested to talk to him about that as well.

Max Tani:
And this is just my own personal opinion, but unlike those guys, Adam I think is really funny. I think Bill Maher at one point was an interesting comedian, but I think really these days has leaned into his role as kind of a pundit. And Joe Rogan I don’t think has ever been funny. That’s not really part of his appeal.

Ben Smith:
Those may be fighting words, Max.

Max Tani:
I mean, that’s fine. They’re welcome to come on the show and debate it with us, come on to Mixed Signals. Look, those guys obviously have had a lot of success, so obviously there are plenty of people who disagree with me, but I think that Adam is really, maybe it just appeals more to me. I find this stuff to be just really incredible and really, really sharp. And also, as you correctly note, I think that he has an ability to throw a lot of people off their games, so it’ll be really funny to see what version of him we get on this show.

Ben Smith:
He’s certainly a rising star, so let’s bring him in.

Max Tani:
Adam, thanks so much for coming on the show.

Adam Friedland:
Thank you for having me.

Max Tani:
For people who don’t know, can you kind of explain the format of your show?

Adam Friedland:
I was on a podcast for the lowest common denominator kind of podcast for just, I don’t know, men with social problems, I’d say.

Max Tani:
That’s why all my friends know it.

Adam Friedland:
I was on a comedy podcast and then one of the guys left the podcast, and then we, I think maybe as a joke, decided to make me into a Dick Cavett-style public intellectual, and then the joke has somehow become real. But actually to clarify, we rebuilt a facsimile of the Cavett Show set here in our studio in Manhattan.
The idea loosely is to, because late Night Talk, well, it’s in a format of a late night talk show, but late night talk shows are kind of at this point so antiquated. They’re like these weird legacy media products where it’s like, I don’t know, why do they even exist at this point? I don’t think that they make money for the networks. I think it’s just this thing that you have to have. Each network has to have a late night show, but at this point it’s like, what? A guy comes on for five minutes, he says an anecdote about losing his luggage then, so reviving that format is weird because it’s kind of a dead thing at this point.

Ben Smith:
Yeah, I mean, I’m 47 and I’m older than both of you, and we’re all way too young to have ever watched that stuff.

Adam Friedland:
I watched Conan growing up,

Ben Smith:
But not Dick Cavett.

Adam Friedland:
No, no, but those you see on YouTube, and the thing about Cavett is he wasn’t funny at all. He was actually one of the least funny comedians I’ve ever seen. He stunk, but he was really good at talking to people, and so the concept is to revive the long form interview format that he had, like an open-ended conversation.
So I do pretty extensive research for a couple of weeks before I have a guest, and I try to come up with a structure for the conversation, but I want it to be open and to go in weird different directions and then to have it veer and then come back on track. And so learning how to do that has been the fun part.

Ben Smith:
And you had this new style career path is a comic, doing standup, but then also having this hit podcast whose name we decided not to say out loud because-

Max Tani:
We’re too squeamish.

Adam Friedland:
C** Town.

Ben Smith:
Oh, there you are.

Max Tani:
Yeah, exactly.

Adam Friedland:
We tried to choose the worst name, but it helped us.

Ben Smith:
You succeeded.

Adam Friedland:
When there were all those cancellation hit pieces, they couldn’t even write our name, so they write the name of the most immature three 30-year-old man back to twelve-year-old’s podcast.

Max Tani:
Dude, it was really funny to see the way that the New York Times wrote around your name.

Adam Friedland:
Like Voldemort or something, yeah.

Ben Smith:
But you basically both did both stand up and then had this digital hit and are now on YouTube and was curious, is that the path of a comedian now to do those things?

Adam Friedland:
I don’t know. I mean, it didn’t exist. We thought you just had to have a podcast, but it was before you made money from podcasts. I mean, we were one of the first people to adopt that Patreon $5 a month, Planet Fitness grift where people just forget that they’ve given you... You’ve had a Planet Fitness membership for 27 years. You’re like, “All right, I guess it was five bucks a month. It’s not that big a deal.”
But I mean, we didn’t know you can make a living from it. I remember when I moved to New York 10 years ago, my parents were like, “What’s the plan?” I had to lie and make something up. I was like, “Yeah, I think that you get Just for Laughs Montreal Festival, and then you get a rep and then you get your late night television debut and then you get your Comedy Central Presents.”
That’s what the path was before. It’s not so deliberate. It is more so that it just happened. I don’t know. We didn’t know how anyone found the show, the old podcast, we didn’t do any promotion. We didn’t do any press, because they wouldn’t say the name. And also we were afraid. What ended up happening was it was all these fan generated clip compilations and stuff on YouTube.
And so the thing kind of grew organically, but we had no idea how people were even finding it. It was truly the laziest thing in the world, and in the opposite, this is by far the hardest thing I’ve ever done because I’m trying to make a television show once a week with three guys. I think it’s the first time I’ve tried anything in my life.
I’m 38, I think I started trying at 35. It’s very scary to try. It’s very scary because if you try your hardest and then someone’s like, “That’s bad.” You’re like, “Hey, that hurt. What do you mean that’s bad? I try.” So I think in podcasting there was this veneer of we’re not trying so you can’t hurt my feelings. But doing this, it’s really investing myself.
But in general, the thesis of what I’m trying to do is, I want to effectively just make something that’s like, I don’t know. I think people are being so weird nowadays. I think the phone has made people so weird. Hopefully, if you make one thing that makes people not feel a little less weird on the phone, I think that’s better.

Max Tani:
How do you feel like the show is going to make people less weird?

Adam Friedland:
Well, I’m working with President Xi to take social media away.

Max Tani:
Absolutely.

Adam Friedland:
That’s the only thing I can think that could fix any of this crap. What do you think people are being crazy? We need China to take away the phone and then everything’s going to be all right.

Max Tani:
What are you seeing on your TikTok feed? What’s on there?

Adam Friedland:
I don’t look at TikTok.

Max Tani:
You don’t look at TikTok?

Adam Friedland:
I don’t look at that crap. What am I, 12? No, no. I mean, I can’t stand looking at the computer. X.com is so scary now. It’s the scariest place. You can see people getting killed. The Holocaust didn’t happen. Murder and then hardcore sex unedited, and I’m like, Elon did free speech. It’s too scary. It’s Sodom and Gomorrah over there. I watch sports.
I think I’m normal. I mean, I look at the phone, I’m superficially aware of the internet, and that’s the interesting thing about what the show is this season. Because I have a lot of people from online, and previously I had this episode with this guy, Destiny, who’s like-

Max Tani:
I watched that.

Adam Friedland:
... a debate... And I don’t even know that existed, I’m like, there’s a thing where guys debate, and I did debate in high school and I was called a loser by people and now you can be famous. So the nice thing is that because I’m operating from a little bit of an outsider perspective because I’m normal, it’s interesting to find out about this stuff and I’m like, “Why the hell is this so famous?”
But within the context of a world that’s very insular, there are things that are real to people that I think to me, I’m just like, “That’s real?” I’m like, “That’s hilarious.” But I am really interested in talking with people because it is just a snapshot of reality or the contemporary moment right now.
So that’s interesting to me is why is that famous? Why is Trump going on podcasts for MMA stuff? I don’t know. Why is Trump going on CTE style podcasts? I don’t know. That’s kind of a snapshot of a contemporary moment. And guess what? It was probably more successful for him to go on a brain injury podcast than to have Beyonce at the Kamala rally.

Ben Smith:
I mean, there is this incredibly inane discourse about finding the Joe Rogan of the left, which you occasionally get mentioned.

Adam Friedland:
Case closed. It’s me, 100%.

Ben Smith:
Do you think podcasting is too dumb?

Adam Friedland:
I don’t know, but what are you going to do? It’s like most people like what? Beer and football? I mean, what am I going to say that’s too dumb. That’s probably what most people,

Ben Smith:
That’s a great entertainment industry insight there.

Adam Friedland:
What if you make us a hamburger that tastes good to most people? What am I going to be like? “This is too dumb of a hamburger.” It’s like, enjoy your hamburger. I don’t know, but it’s weird. What’s weird is when you think about the people on the other side, I think the focus is always on the TV show of Trump and Elon and stuff like that. And everyone likes politics now, which is like, I literally was called gay my entire upbringing for liking politics.
I did a walk out in ninth grade for the Iraq war and no one else wanted to walk out with me. And it should go back to that. It should go back to... Now, everyone likes it and it’s kind of boring. What’s more interesting is if you turn the camera around at who the people are watching the show, and I think probably if you look at American society today, it’s probably the most bummed out, demoralized people have ever been in my lifetime, I think.
No one trusts the media or no one trusts our institutions anymore and stuff, but everyone’s pretty much beaten down and demoralized. So that’s what’s more interesting to me is that people are pretty lonely and bummed.

Max Tani:
I do think that, I mean, that is obviously part of the appeal of your show. It does feel like is there is a level of connection that people feel when they watch hours of your show. They feel like they know you. You’re like somebody who obviously makes them laugh. And when you were doing C** Town, obviously people felt like maybe they were hanging out with their friends or something like that.

Adam Friedland:
Yeah, para social, right?

Max Tani:
Yeah, exactly.

Adam Friedland:
Especially with the last podcast, which I won’t even dare say the name.

Max Tani:
Thank you.

Adam Friedland:
I won’t even dare say... Listen, I didn’t know I was on The 700 Club right now. I didn’t know this is a Christian program.

Ben Smith:
Max and I have absolutely different views of this.

Adam Friedland:
I didn’t know I was talking to Tammy Faye Baker. I mean, you feel like you’re hanging out with your buddies, right?

Max Tani:
Yeah. Well, we’ve got to take a quick break, but we will be right back with Adam Friedland.

Ben Smith:
I talked to Ted Sarandos recently, who runs Netflix and who sort of basically asked him about YouTube, and he was like, “Oh, YouTube is cute and it’s a nice place for people to get good at their craft before they come to Netflix.” And I was curious if you see it that way, if you see it as practice for the main stage or if you like it on there?

Adam Friedland:
What? You brought me up or something, or did he say anything? What did Sarandos say? I’m just kidding. I wonder actually how, if you want to talk into the nitty-gritty, I wonder... I mean, you see how much money these freaking guys in Austin are making. They’re not doing it through a traditional system, and I think the question is eventually is the deal, I mean, could you make more money and have creative agency over your product and never have to sell, Sarandos, you bastard?
No, I mean, that’s the question, and I think that that’s kind of what it seems like it’s headed in that direction. But we’ll see. I mean, I’ll say this. I have a lot of friends comedians that work their butts off. They sell a show to Max or something, they get two seasons, they sell their equity in their idea, and then they get canceled and it sucks, and they’re depressed.
If theoretically, I could keep doing this and I don’t have to adhere to a runtime or standards and practices or a big publicly traded daddy above me and I can make more money, I mean, it seems like this is incentivize us not doing that. But if Sarandos wants to give me a call, for the record, I’m not interested.

Max Tani:
Well, I was actually curious. Have you had opportunities to do something like that and have you turned them down to kind of stay independent?

Adam Friedland:
No, most certainly not.

Max Tani:
No, you have not. No opportunities to sell out yet.

Adam Friedland:
Well, it’s weird actually. I remember we got... When we started doing the podcast and having a Patreon, I remember we had a meeting with a big talent agency. I won’t say the name, and they were like, “Here’s the pitch.” They were like, “We sell your show to a podcasting network.” I think they were Earwolf or something or some sort of podcasting network for $40,000.” And we’re like, “We make more that a month.” We’re like, “why would we do that?” But the truth was that the industry hadn’t figured out what it was yet. They were behind.
So I don’t know. I think that’s the exciting thing. The exciting thing is right now, I’m endeavoring to do something and I get to do whatever I want. It’s awesome. It’s so cool. My ego’s gone insane. I mean, these guys are like, I’m literally, I’m Joseph Stalin in this office. I have microphones everywhere. I’m Nixon. No.

Max Tani:
It does feel like obviously something is working and it’s resonating when you’re having Julian Casablancas, whoever’s working with him thinks it’s important enough for him to come down and to be on the show.

Adam Friedland:
The other thing is I think Trump kind of blessed my a little bit, because him doing Rogan and Theo and stuff during the election, I think it legitimized the platform. And so selling people on doing the internet two years ago, it didn’t make sense. Why should I do the internet? But now it’s considered, yeah. Thank you, president. Thank you, Mr. President. Thank you so much, Mr. President.
No, no, but it has made it... We saw the power of him accessing audiences in this way, and we saw how clueless the other side was. Just wheeling out Oprah and then us finding out that they gave Oprah money for that and we’re like, doesn’t she have a billion dollars?

Max Tani:
But so now obviously you have people who want to come on the show who obviously would not have done that six months ago. Someone like Ro Khanna, the Democratic congressman who pretty clearly wants to be president someday, and he’s like, “I’m going on the Adam Friedland Show. This is important for me to reach youth voters, The next generation.”

Ben Smith:
Young men, I think, specifically.

Adam Friedland:
Well, it’s mostly chicks watching, hot chicks mostly.

Ben Smith:
I’m sure.

Adam Friedland:
I think it’s like probably 99% male. But I’ve been trying to pitch mayoral candidates in New York about that. I’ve been trying to say to them, “Listen, no one’s going to watch this public access crap.”

Max Tani:
Well, you had Chris Cuomo on. Did you ask Chris to get Andrew Cuomo on?

Adam Friedland:
No. What is he? He’s doing a Biden 2020 right now. He’s sitting it out.

Max Tani:
That’s true.

Adam Friedland:
He’s just hiding. It’s a classic Biden, the hide. I like a guy hiding away to not f*** up running for something.

Max Tani:
So I want to ask you about one of the things that had happened to you about two years ago. You had the Matty Healy episode where he was on the show, and then a bunch of Swifties came after you because you guys are doing impressions and whatnot.

Ben Smith:
This is Taylor Swift’s then boyfriend?

Max Tani:
Exactly. Which kind of ends up snowballing into her dating Travis Kelce, which I think is...

Adam Friedland:
Yeah, history bends to my will.

Max Tani:
It’s like a butterfly effect type moment.

Adam Friedland:
But what was interesting about that is that for Swifties, and I think it’s a defect of the internet, going back to what we were talking about before, it’s politics for these people, liking a song is politics to them. They’re furious and it’s something to believe in, but that’s strange to me. I had to call my sister and have her explain all this to me.

Max Tani:
I mean, Apple and Spotify then also decided to take down the episode of the show.

Adam Friedland:
No, we took it down.

Max Tani:
Oh, you guys took it down.

Adam Friedland:
We took it down, yeah.

Max Tani:
Why did you guys take it down?

Adam Friedland:
We didn’t want Matty to get in trouble with the Swifties. Listen, we’re in the middle of an enormous international incident here. This was like the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Ben Smith:
Did you have heated arguments about taking it down about free speech versus...

Adam Friedland:
No, it’s a podcast. Who cares? His manager called and he’s like, “Can you take it down?” We’re like, “Sure, fine.” I don’t know. People think, wait, that’s funny because I forgot. People think that Apple and Spotify took that down.

Max Tani:
Yeah, it was written that way that they took it down.

Adam Friedland:
Oh my god. Well, there was like 2000 Google alerts I was getting a day, an hour. It was like I was in the Hindustan Times. It was crazy. But to me it was like, I don’t know why people are mad about Taylor Swift.

Max Tani:
Does knowing that you have that level of scrutiny on you now, does that change the way that you approach or think about any of these things or are you just part of what’s worked is-

Adam Friedland:
No, it’s...

Max Tani:
... not doing that and so I’m not going to do that?

Adam Friedland:
No, because making a living, it means that I’m doing well, right? And what’s the scrutiny? What, am I going to go to Guantanamo Bay? I don’t know. What am I going to get in trouble? Literally, at this point, I really don’t... And this might sound like douchebagged, but I really don’t really care what anyone thinks.
I want my friends to the show and the fact that my dad can watch it now, I really like, because I used to pedal in smut, and my dad now likes it. And he’s like, “Great episode.” That I like, because you can’t really reflect on where does this exist in the zeitgeist. I read a biography, I think Woody Allen’s biography, and he said that he was just like, he would lock picture. He made movies for 50 years and how do you keep working for 50 years? And he just would lock picture on an edit and then just sit down the next day and start writing the next one. You have to treat your job like you’re an accountant or something, or you’re going to... It’s just your job.

Ben Smith:
These days, there’s a lot of talk about studying your audience and metrics and trying to be hyper-responsive, not into that.

Max Tani:
It does seem though that the people we’ve talked to for the show who’ve been the most successful are the people who just do not pay attention to any of that stuff at all.

Ben Smith:
Who care least, yeah.

Adam Friedland:
I just want to do a good job. And you never feel like you’re doing a good job either. You always feel like, “Oh God, I suck. This stinks.” And then you cobble something together and then the most important thing is you just put something out and then you forget, and then you just start working on the next thing. Because anytime someone’s like, “This is the greatest thing of all time, then you’re like, “What are you? You’re like Kanye.” You’re like, no, everyone hates everything that they make, but in doing so, you get better at doing what you’re doing.

Ben Smith:
One other question about this moment, because I think you’re easing into this big political space where for whatever reason right now in the United States are leading truth tellers, officially are Bill Maher and John Oliver and Trevor Noah.

Adam Friedland:
Oh God.

Ben Smith:
Are comics.

Adam Friedland:
I don’t like that. I don’t like that.

Ben Smith:
Why not?

Adam Friedland:
We’re not smart people. We’re people that are trying... We’re in nightclubs doing jokes about Tinder. I mean, we should not be given this place in the world. I mean, here’s the thing. I know what I’m equipped and qualified to talk about.
So if I have a member of Congress on the show, I’m not going to be like, “Tell me about HR 274,” da, da. What am I, f***ing Ezra Klein? I’m not going to do that, but I do know this, “Hey, you’re in the government. Everyone doesn’t like you. Do you know that everyone doesn’t like the government? Why do you want to be in the government? You should just be a lawyer somewhere or maybe a lobbyist. You can have fun doing that. Make a lot of money. Why do you want to be in the government?”
Those are more interesting questions because they speak to a contemporary moment. And one thing I am aware of and I do feel confident in saying is that people are, like I said before, just bombed out. And if you could reflect that in talking to someone, I think that’s a worthwhile endeavor.

Max Tani:
Adam, this has been really fun and congratulations on the success. I appreciate it.

Adam Friedland:
Yeah, we’re out. First episode this week, Anthony Weiner, current candidate for city council in New York.

Max Tani:
I can’t wait to watch. Thanks, Adam.

Adam Friedland:
I don’t think he liked me. Bye, guys.

Max Tani:
So Ben, I thought that that was pretty interesting and obviously very different from the types of interviews that we normally do. What did you think about the Adam Friedland experience?

Ben Smith:
Honestly, the most interesting thing to me is that he is reviving this 1960s, early-’60s Dick Cavett show and the wood paneling and the weird suit he wears in this sense that you want to have a kind of intense, in his case, kind of intensely weird, long-form intellectual conversation with somebody, even if he’s doing it in a fun house mirror way. There’s this nostalgia for something there that’s, I don’t know, that I found really compelling in his actual show.
And then I do think just this, he’s right in the middle of this moment of wide-open opportunity for people who have followings who don’t seem to care at all about whether they make people upset. And that’s something where he was kind of, I would say, almost ahead of his time. He’s an edgelord of the left, and that is obviously serving him very well in a moment when you can no longer be canceled basically.

Max Tani:
But at the same time, one of the things that’s really interesting is that he has on people from all different political perspectives, and it’s very clear that he’s not judgmental. I think that’s why a lot of those people walk away liking him or feeling more respect for him at least.

Ben Smith:
Yeah, he honestly represents something that feels really new and generationally new, and I think that’s very appealing at a moment when everyone is really sick of the screaming match, cable news driven, lowest denominator, social media politics. I mean, I think the fact that he hates social media and hates his phone also is very, I think, speaks to a lot of people and probably gets reflected through the show.

Max Tani:
Absolutely. But it is obviously funny that he has the complicated relationship that all of us who create stuff for the internet have, which is needing to be connected to your phone and actually being quite good at navigating it. And actually, obviously very fluent in a lot of these things.
I mean, a lot of the people who he’s having on and he’s had on are streamers or YouTube comedians, people who are very, very much of this very specific media moment. And I think that it probably resonates with a lot of people, this idea that you can have these two types of relationships with that content, which is both needing to know it to understand what’s going on, and also being a little bit repulsed and also amused by it. I don’t know. It’s very interesting.

Ben Smith:
Do you think 10, 15 years from now, he’s on late night?

Max Tani:
I think that probably not. I think that he still is a little bit... He wants to push the boundaries a little bit too much, I think, to ascend to that level. And clearly he doesn’t really want it. He talked about how he was like, “I would be open to that kind of thing, but I want to have my own independence.” He doesn’t want to have somebody looking over his shoulder telling him what he can say and what he can’t say.

Ben Smith:
Yeah. Although his work reflects this real nostalgia for old-fashioned TV, I mean, that’s literally, he’s built himself a set from the early 1960s to get back to the glory days of political talk and comedy, I mean, it’s really... I don’t know. It’s interesting. Well, anyway, thank you, Max, for bringing him on. I learned a lot.

Max Tani:
Thanks, Ben. Well, that’s it for us this week. Thank you for listening to this very interesting episode of Mixed Signals from Semafor Media. Our show is produced by Sheena Ozaki, with special thanks to Britta Galanis, Chad Lewis, Rachel Oppenheim, Anna Pezino, Garrett Wiley, Jules Zern, and Tori Kurr. Our engineer is Rick Kwan, and our theme music is by Billy Libby, our public editor this week is Ted Sarandos. Ted, listen to the episode. Tell us what you think of Adam Friedland. What do we think? Maybe a deal, maybe not. We’ll see.

Ben Smith:
And if you like Mixed Signals, please follow us wherever you get your podcasts. Please subscribe on YouTube. Feel free to review us.

Max Tani:
And if you want more, you can always sign up for Semafor’s Media Newsletter out every Sunday night.