A long-form interview series on synthetic media, attention and cultural power in Asia — twenty-five conversations with the people building the tools and the people responsible for institutions.
Twenty-five episodes, released weekly across a single season. Each conversation runs 40–60 minutes, recorded on camera, published as video and audio, and broken into roughly twenty derivative assets.
The series is deliberately limited. A closed season with a fixed guest list is worth more to a partner than an open-ended show, because the whole body of work can be underwritten rather than a scattering of episodes — and because the guest list is the product.
Synthetic media has made cultural production almost free. That has consequences for anyone who makes, funds, regulates or preserves culture in this region — and there is currently no serious, sustained conversation about it conducted from Asia.
The series alternates between two kinds of guest: the people building the tools, and the people responsible for institutions, memory and legitimacy. That alternation is the format, and it is what no existing show does.
What a listener leaves with:
Partners are not buying an audience that already exists. They are buying proximity to a specific set of people. The credibility of this proposal therefore rests entirely on who has agreed to appear.
Institutions represented among confirmed guests:
The guest list has been built deliberately rather than opportunistically, and it balances across five categories so the season reads as a survey rather than a series of favours.
| Category | Episodes |
|---|---|
| Builders — AI, platforms, tooling, studios | 7 |
| Institutions — museums, curators, archives | 6 |
| Policy & government — regulation, soft power, diplomacy | 5 |
| Capital — family offices, foundations, patrons | 4 |
| Practitioners — artists, creators, designers working natively with the tools | 3 |
| Total | 25 |
Guest headshots and titles are presented as a grid in the accompanying one-pager. Every name is confirmed before publication of this document.
This is not a general-interest programme. It is designed for a narrow, senior audience that is otherwise very difficult to reach through paid media.
Geography: Singapore and Southeast Asia primarily; secondary concentrations in Hong Kong, Taipei, Seoul, Tokyo, and among Asia-focused professionals in London and New York.
One episode is released each week for twenty-five weeks. Every episode ships in video and audio simultaneously, on the principle that the two formats reach the same person in different states of attention.
A defined portion of partnership proceeds is allocated to paid amplification on YouTube and Meta, targeted at the audience categories above rather than at scale.
Every episode moves through a fixed six-stage lifecycle. The stages are scheduled in advance so production never depends on inspiration.
| Assets per episode | Count |
|---|---|
| Long-form video and audio | 2 |
| Vertical clips | 10 |
| Trailer and answer cut | 2 |
| Quote cards | 4 |
| Transcript and written recap | 2 |
| Per episode · across 25 episodes | 20 · 500 |
Reach here is a function of guest signal and format multiplication, not of an existing audience. The projection is therefore built from the bottom up, surface by surface, for a single episode.
| Surface | Impressions |
|---|---|
| Vertical clips (10 per episode) | 40,000 |
| Paid amplification | 25,000 |
| Guest network reshare | 20,000 |
| Owned channels and newsletter | 6,500 |
| Long-form video | 6,000 |
| Audio downloads | 2,500 |
| Per episode | 100,000 |
| Season total (× 25) | 2,500,000 |
Two structural reasons to expect a long tail beyond these figures. Because the same conversation exists in six formats, a meaningful share of the audience encounters it more than once and on more than one platform. And because the content is instructional rather than topical, it continues to be discovered and shared well after release.
| Per episode | Cost |
|---|---|
| Production — crew, studio, logistics | $2,400 |
| Post — long-form edit | $1,800 |
| Post — ten vertical clips | $1,000 |
| Post — graphics, captions, thumbnails | $500 |
| Transcript and written recap | $300 |
| Per episode | $6,000 |
| Season | Cost |
|---|---|
| Production (25 × $2,400) | $60,000 |
| Post-production (25 × $3,600) | $90,000 |
| Paid amplification (25 × $1,000) | $25,000 |
| Identity, site, launch | $15,000 |
| Contingency | $10,000 |
| Total season cost | $200,000 |
Twenty-five guests have been secured over months of work. Each will spend 40–60 minutes on substantive, specific material — the kind of conversation that gets referenced rather than consumed. The season amounts to a thousand minutes of programming, roughly the length of a substantial audiobook, on a subject with no incumbent authority.
Because the series is limited and the guest list is high-signal, a partner gets disproportionately more from backing the entire season than from appearing in one or two episodes. Association with the whole body of work is the product. For that reason a small number of partner positions are offered rather than rolling per-episode inventory.
The right partner:
Every position runs across all twenty-five episodes. Placements sit within a 40–60 minute episode as follows: pre-roll at 0:00, first mid-roll at approximately 15:00, second mid-roll at approximately 30:00.
| Position | Effective CPM |
|---|---|
| Founding Partner — $135,000 against 2.5M impressions | $54 |
| Season Partner — $65,000 against 2.5M impressions | $26 |
| Chapter Partner — $25,000 against 500K impressions | $50 |
| Total raise against a $200,000 season cost | $225,000 |
A single partner may take all three positions. Rates are held for the full season and are not re-priced if reach exceeds projection.
The series sits alongside an existing programme of private, off-record dinners convening government, institutional art, technology and capital. Partners at the top two tiers are seated at those dinners.
This document contains no measured audience data, because the series has not yet published. Everything in section 07 is a projection, and the assumptions behind it are set out here so they can be argued with.