I built my dream podcast studio in Austin.

[laughter] >> It's supposed to say studio tour. This is the most expensive thing I've ever bought, the most complex project I've ever built. We did it. The studio's finished. It was arduous. Every little touch means something. We spent so long. I mean, okay, where do I start? So, this is the first day in what will become the Monumental Studio. I'm excited. I am excited, slightly daunted. We moved in, we found out that the building had a ton of mold, so we needed to remediate all of that, but it's part of an HOA, which means that you can't make changes without getting their approval, and some of the mold was inside and outside, which means you need to reclad the outside differently. Everything needs to be done sequentially because you can't do the build until the mold's done, and the mold can't be done until the remediation's finished, and then the particulate clean needs to come after that, and the bathroom needs to be done at this time. This I feel like this is the real winning in the weeds >> Yeah. >> of of what we're trying to to get into, and getting that wrong is going to be like, "Oh, we committed so much time." We're talking about the specifics of the office and the studio. Uh I keep changing my mind. >> any kind of pendant lighting that we want, but if we don't want to go that route, then yeah, that's >> I'm pretty good at moving quickly, but uh I can be quite indecisive. This is essentially any build is just a huge [music] list of decisions that need to be made. It's not just what do I want it to look like, it's can I make that happen? >> Without any doubt, this is the [music] most complex and elevated studio we've put together for any of our clients, even Rogan. It's just nothing was skimped on in terms of, you know, quality, budget, equipment, constructions. >> It is so difficult to put any kind of building project together on a good timeline, but when you're also trying to build a studio, and there's electronics and lighting setups, [music] and five different companies providing your lenses and your cameras and the storage that goes [music] online, and that needs to speak to the system that actually records locally. That needs to be uploaded to the cloud. It is just an unrelenting stream of challenge after challenge after challenge. And each time that we think we've got to a stage where we can begin to move on to the next thing, there is a hold-up. And this is, I guess, the same whenever you're trying to do any big project, especially something that requires people with hammers and nails and paint and then you add cameras and microphones in on top, and it just gets exponentially more difficult. I'm uh learning the art of patience one studio build day at a time. And it's good. I'm going to show you studio tour. I bought this 10 months ago. It's still not entirely finished. It's nearly nearly nearly nearly done, but you've been watching me record episodes out of here for a long time. So, now's the time for me to show you around. >> [music] >> Most impressive part. Most impressive part is that doormat. So, this is the studio and the office. I bought this in October, and this was a marketing office. None of these pillars existed. This middle section didn't exist. Obviously, no podcast studio. We made fake walls, fake ceilings, painted everything. I wanted to make a green room, green room adjacent. Sometimes guests bring family, friends, managers, and [music] they can come here and sit and watch this sexy cool vegetable thing that we've got in the office that everybody sees, including the guests when they walk in. vb.plus/modernwisdom. You can put whatever you want on the board, apart from swear words. What's been cool is I've been so involved in everything, the art, the soft furnishings, like Cozy Earth. I really love Cozy Earth [ __ ] So, like we got these I don't know, every time I sit down it always feels really comfy. We got this, I think it's funny, pencil design head in the sand ostrich wallpaper. I just think it's really cute and kind of dumb and it's everyone's like, "What the [ __ ] is that?" Everybody's got different offices. We've got a place where people can work out here. We've got a cute kitchen there. We have a variety of snacks. Siete, sponsor me. Not Stockholm or awesome. Siete, I need you as well. Custom Neutronic fridge. We are fueled by frosty beverages and have an equal opportunity energy drink consumer. Obviously, the lion's share is Neutronic. >> [music] >> Very important. My office. I love the fact that it's light and airy, which is a big deal. This little mezzanine, being able to be outside and, you know, take a call or just get a little bit of fresh air is pretty cool. This is a copy of Joe Rogan's favorite book. So, [ __ ] it's his birthday today. >> We're out. >> It's Christopher. Good to see it. >> Thank you very much for the book. This is very cool of you. >> It's in scripted or there's a inscription inside to Yoko Ono, who knows well what the jazz life entails. >> I've just exploded a can of Neutronic all over my crotch as well. Look, I love being able to make a fool of myself on Rogan. I love bringing you great guests on the podcast and your support and pressing subscribe helps me to continue to do that. So, if you haven't hit subscribe, or if you just go and check down below whether or not YouTube has unsubscribed you from the channel. Tons of people who have pressed the button apparently just get unsubscribed, which sucks and makes me very sad indeed. So, go there, check. Come on. Please. And I will continue to do my best [music] to bring you great episodes all the time. On this table, right here. Thanks. This was a gift from Mark Zuckerberg. That's the decal from his ranch when I got to go and hang out with him in Kauai. This was a gift from Bill Thompson. He put a custom Modern Wisdom decal on the side. I'm aware that we're kind of edging you toward the actual thing that you care about, which is the studio in there, but this is foreplay. It's a little bit of This is a interior design foreplay. I'm like a naked Marie Kondo. Marie Kondo? Is that who did the [ __ ] Who did the punctuation? Whatever. The whole studio because I've kind of got PTSD from VOCs and mold and bad paint building material. We did micro-particulate clean before we came in. Jasper air purifiers in every room. But importantly, we wanted the furniture that we used to all have no VOCs, no blow-off, just the highest quality that we could. And this is all human scale. So Human Scale make the best office furniture on the planet. It It absolutely [ __ ] rules. I've fallen in love with vertical bookcases. Had one in my first ever studio back in Newcastle. Go back and watch the David Allen episode. I remember seeing it going, "That looks so sick." So I've I've had one of these everywhere that I go. That's a gay bed. Very important. Can we look Can we zoom in? It's very important. Bullpen. That's where the blood and the feces and the titles and the thumbnails are made. I did everything in my bedroom on my own for basically forever. So to have a place to go to work that isn't a coffee shop is still kind of deranging. I come in and the people here and they say, "Hey, you. This thing happened in whatever." As opposed to it just being a Facebook Messenger chat between me and video guy Dean. So >> Hello. >> We get a lot of questions about what the setup is for the podcast. It's been the most basic setup in history, which is this guy. When people ask what's Modern Wisdom about, well, it's interesting cuz there's porn stars, but there's philosophers, there's psychologists, and then sometimes there's people that are trying to maximize our ability to do space flight. And then there's like this whole other area of health and fitness. And then I've got these two mates from the UK, and we kind of talk about how to make the best toasted sandwich. So yeah, the kind of that. >> It has been kind of insane to go for as long as I have and did just doing it out of bedrooms and and spare rooms. This really has been a very spit and sawdust operation for a long time. Every single bedroom of every single house or Airbnb that I've stayed in for more than a couple of weeks has been turned into a studio. My bedroom in the first house I ever bought was the first 500 episodes of the show before I flew out to America, before I moved to America. I think that grassroots, spit and sawdust, just make it work with sellotape and cable ties thing maybe held me back for a little while. I think I was like like [ __ ] it, I can do it myself. I don't need to have a big space. I can go and have the most beautiful podcast in the world and then record out of my spare bedroom and both of those things can work at the same time. And that is true, but it's not exactly conducive to being a sane human because some days I don't ever leave the house. I wouldn't ever leave the house and [music] I wouldn't speak to anyone except for the guest. Wake up, go to the gym, listening, prepping, thinking about stuff, come back, still prepping in my dining room, go upstairs, record, [music] finish up, go back downstairs. 6:00 p.m. and I I spoke to one other person and they were on the other side of the laptop. So it's nice to have a place to come into work. This is the co-working space. It's really great. I get to come in and I can, you know, do my prep and sit down and have meetings with people if I need to or the guests get to come in. It's mostly just all of this, all of this so far is the spiral staircase going up to the Bonnie Blue Bedroom. It's a little bit of foreplay, catchup, have a bit of a chat. Oh, do you want a new tonic? Should you try and do you want to try this protein shake? Whatever. And then we get into the main event. >> [music] >> There it is. Let's go down. Yeah, a little bit of lower. >> [music] >> This is 20. Yeah, I think that's That's nice. >> Do you still get that spill underneath the light? >> Yeah, and you're still catching a good bit of it from here as well cuz this is quite bright. >> Yeah. >> Nearly a year into buying the office and we're still fixing things. Still Still making small artistic improvements. >> I think the window falloff really helps with the blowout from the back of this person. >> Yeah. >> So, that's the shot that we're trying to fix. >> We spent so long, dude, putting this together. [ __ ] me. Okay, where do I start? This table's custom. This table's entirely custom and it's a trapezoid shape. So, me and guest one are further apart than guest four and guest three. And what that means is you get [music] a four shot from the wide shot, so you can see all four of us. In here is a bunch of stimulants and disguises. What's the make autism great again hat? Thank you. Very important. Thank you. >> [snorts] >> I mean, this is really me trying to bring together everything from a color perspective, from a history perspective. Copper and teal is this kind of cheat. It's a little bit of a cheap trick from Hollywood, the opposite ends of a color wheel, but they just look so beautiful and I kind of fell in love with it a long time ago. So, we got this custom tree made in Singapore. So, this is completely custom made and shipped from Singapore. I wanted something that had a really interesting shape that would create all of these nice shadows, uh but would also double up as a a shelf shelving so we could put little practicals and art elements and stuff in. So, we've got statues, some books. These guys I love these guys climbing up. Cricket ball, so you used to play cricket. From a lighting perspective, I'm fortunate that, you know, we've built some of the most beautiful sets in the world, I think, for podcasting in the space of a day. The guys were able to come in and dial and dial and dial and refine and play with [music] until they got everything exactly as they wanted. So, as you can see, if you look up, there's a lot of Nanlites and some aperture stuff playing around here. We got a great partnership with Nanlite. Aperture also absolutely [ __ ] rule. We worked so hard. I mean, even looking at this softbox that we've covered with our own muslin cloth, because it changes the way that there's a falloff across people's faces, as you can see here as well. So, this is just a little fill. It's just a little bounce fill, but we've put tiny little bit of additional cloth over the top of it, which just creates a a little bit more flattering shape on the face. And then, all of this are Nanlite tubes to create the colors, to create the falloff. My big flex was I wanted to have one set with multiple looks without it feeling like it was too chaotic and people didn't know what was going on. So, the solution that we came up with was to create fake windows. So, shock horror, this isn't a real window. Behind here, Pavo tubes, Nanlites. And all of these are controlled by the same system that controls all the rest of the lighting. This window will never be seen. You will never This is the only time you're ever going to see this window, cuz it's not in any of the shots. It's behind me, behind the cameras. So, this was kind of the the feature piece. And in this window, we're bouncing tubes off of a white wall through uh diffusion paper here, and then through hand-cracked, hand-painted, hand-stained glass panes that are individually colored with different colored gels, and then with You can't even see this, these little tree branches, which were again custom-made. And we can change the color of the [ __ ] tubes. So, we can turn it from daytime to nighttime to sunset to spooky house. And all of the foreground lighting changes to match the background lighting so that it feels cohesive. Because if you have a different color background and people's skin looks the same, it doesn't feel like the light is falling out of the windows. And that to me is just the coolest [ __ ] thing. One set, multiple different looks. Kind of insane to take a room, make it completely brand new, plaster the whole thing, and then go through even more work to make it look derelict. All of this, this moss, put on by hand, stuck on by hand. All of the cracks [music] in the walls also custom created. And we're using it to hide cabling and perhaps the centerpiece. I didn't order this or ask for it, and I came in one day and it was just up, and the team had put it together. >> [laughter] >> And we had a bunch of other ones. There's a topless version, which I gifted him on the pod. There's another version, I think, where we're in swim shorts. >> To present you with two versions of a very famous photo that's going to be behind you for most of the episodes. >> A Rembrandt? >> Yeah. Uh, an original. >> Yeah, this is an original. [laughter] I'm not sure if you've noticed. >> Um I'd like to thank my friends and family. >> I look like some sort of freak child with bicep veins. >> I think it's like ancient Chippendales. >> Yes, it is. But for some reason for some reason you're in Hawaiian shorts. I noticed that. And then the one behind it is the This is the original. >> All class. >> I can't do these. >> Um, well, what? >> Well, if you go back and watch episode 17, both my old couch in Newcastle has this Hand of Adam. I didn't even say to put this up, but the guys saw that and then recreated it. And then to have this fall off with the light above and below. I mean, I mean, what You might be getting super bored. This [music] might be too nerdy for you, but I I think it's really cool. I'm going to sit down and reminded it's just little doses of nostalgia and trajectory for me. This thing that was over, the first ever episode that me and Dean worked on together 8 and 1/2 years ago, has got a little nod here underneath the TV in a new city, in a new country, in a new business, essentially. >> [laughter] >> So, this is the party trick that you might have seen a couple of times on the show. As I said, all of the lighting in here can change. What do you want to go to? Do you want to show the sunset one, the fire? Streets of LA. Streets of LA. So, um if you look up here, all of this lighting, so look, this is changing now. We can have pulsing. And you'll notice that all of the foreground lighting changes, all of the colors change. So, all of this is now different. We've got this sort of Streets of LA thing going on. Let's do the daylight. Let's just do the normal one, standard. So, the standard one is really good unless somebody's very pale. So, again, now all of this is brightened up. And this is good because it's pretty neutral, nice falloff on people's faces. It's quite bright. There's not It's not as dramatic, but there's still a good bit of drama going on because we've got this negative fill. Yeah, let's do the spooky one. So, we we put this one together for Peter Santanello. Peter goes into deep rural Appalachian forgotten communities. And um this one, that fill that was up there has completely been killed. We've got a little bit more green coming through these lights. And what that results in is this really aggressive shadow. So, this now, remembering cameras are coming in from this side, that's what creates that sort of really interesting shot. When you've got the tights, and then we've got this sharp wide as well. I really love this profile shot that we've started using recently. We did it on the Alantobot on episode in the church in London last year. My favorite shot of all. That side-on shot, especially when stuff's this dark, just looks so moody and cool. So, so over the top. Like, I'm not Martin Scorsese, right? But I think all of this shit's fun, and I like having the conversations, but playing around with this is I've gotten into it. I don't know what I'm doing, but I know what I like. All right, let's see. Is it fun? Damn [ __ ] right it's fun. Virtual set. More human scale custom binds growing up here to try and create a little bit of texture. This is for virtual episodes, guests that can't come to see me. I spent so long doing virtual episodes. I think we were by far the biggest virtual podcast on the planet. Not the biggest, but the biggest virtual podcast on the planet for a very, very long time. And still very pro virtual episodes because the content is what I care about the most. I spent a long time building the skill set to be able to do this virtual thing well, and I'm not prepared to let that go. I would rather speak to a guest virtually than not at all if I really love them. And I'm also doing more solo stuff. So, [music] you will see you have maybe already seen more down the pipe me essay style reflections, Q&A's, lessons episodes, etc. >> The significance of today is that it's our first episode in the new studio. It's like stepping into another world, right? I think overall to be able to have so much use case from the studio, like the the capability the studio has, you know, a lot of people don't realize like what goes into the back end [music] of just like simple things. Like I want to be able to capture my desktop. I want to be able to do Zoom calls. [music] I want to have nine freaking cameras in one space all going to one place, you know, like so when you come in here, you know, you're just kind of wowed by just [music] the finishes, but when you're sitting down, I think what people don't appreciate is how low impact it is with the amount of technology that's in this space. [music] So, you're sitting down, you're in a comfortable place, vulnerable to be able to have these conversations, but everything's out of sight, you know, the lights are all mounted to the ceiling, [music] you know, the system is its own thing. Jared's running it, the producer's there. You can tell who put a lot of time and and thought [music] into making sure that, you know, you had a really cool spot to have a two, three-hour conversation. >> [music] >> This is HQ. This is like home base. This is where like everything is going to be feeding into [music] and out of, whether that's the guests, whether that's the content. Having this home base in the literal central center of [music] Austin, Texas, having the guests come through like a nice central location [music] to where we'll just be able to get a lot of stuff done. >> [clears throat] >> Oh, man. Finally. Holy [ __ ] >> [music] >> Today is studio launch day. It's taken so long. It's taken so long. Gentlemen, new studio. Uh so, this is the first place that I've ever had, which is mine. It's [music] the first time that I've ever got to record in a studio that isn't someone else's or a bedroom. So, I've kind of moved from a prostitute to a girlfriend. This feels like a long-term commitment. >> Cheers. >> To the first. >> Cheers. >> To the first. >> There it is. >> Honor and privilege, [laughter] gentlemen. >> My wingman for life. >> I LOVE THIS GUY. >> DIDN'T EXPECT THAT, HUH? >> HELP ME. HELP YOU. ME. Help [laughter] you. >> You know, when I look back across the trajectory of the show, it is not one of palatial luxury and fortune or expenditure, really. It's been very shoe-string budget and >> [music] >> and then when we started to make a little bit of money, I just dumped all of it into making beautiful episodes and prayed that we could make it back and run it back again and run it back again and run it back again. Slowly laddered up and then, yeah, we started to do David Goggins [music] on a sound stage in Vegas with custom-built sets and a my assistant at the time with a piece of [ __ ] cardboard [music] wafting smoke through the room because the fans had blown the fog machine around. We didn't know what we were doing. There is nothing that you could do to get me to speed run that journey. Cuz it was so cool. I understand that on the way up you have uncertainty about whether or not you're going to make it, and that means your uncertainty doesn't make it feel glorious in the moment, it makes [music] it feel perilous. But in retrospect, that is all of the coolest [ __ ] Like this is also very cool, right? I'm not going to lie. It's [ __ ] awesome. I get to come in here, Hunter Biden, Jocko Willink, Matt McCusker, Duncan Trussell, having a laugh, and you puffing [music] on a pipe, and wearing a captain's hat. Like it's sick. But that's not what gets you here. What gets you here is doing it in your bedroom, Airbnbs, and hotels, and I'm some [ __ ] bloke from the north of the UK who started off with no money, no nothing at all, no spare time, and [music] just really loved having these conversations, and didn't stop. And because I didn't stop, I ended up here. And you know, it's been enabled by every single one of you guys, by a device in your pocket. Like you literally changed my life. But that's not going to say that it's as much your studio as it is mine. It's definitely mine. But you played a big part in it, too. That's the tour. I'm done. Expect more round table episodes over the next couple of months, more lessons, more master class stuff. We're going to start to put together medleys of my favorite moments from different guests and different episodes. Jordan Peterson on resilience, Alex Hormozi on how to build a business. I'm excited. I'm excited for what the future's got in store. I don't need to travel quite as much as I did. I did over 100,000 miles every year for the last 3 years. I get to sit in that room. People can travel to me. I appreciate you all. To have this is not something that I take lightly, and it's awesome. And I appreciate you all. I'll see you next time. >> Free audio post production by alphonic.com.