Bad Friends Just Got a Lot Bigger

Two guys sat down to make each other laugh. Five years later, they're pulling in 38 million views a month.

That's the story of "Bad Friends," the podcast hosted by Andrew Santino and Bobby Lee. And this week it just got another chapter. Wave Sports & Entertainment announced it's taking over ad sales and distribution for the show, folding it into a roster that already includes some of the biggest names in digital comedy.

I love stories like this. Not because of the money involved — though there's clearly a lot of it — but because of what it says about how people build things now. Nobody handed Santino and Lee a studio deal in 2020. They just started talking into microphones about being friends who annoy each other. Chaotic chemistry, unfiltered conversations, relentless roasting. That's literally how the show describes itself. And somehow that turned into one of the most successful weekly comedy podcasts going.

So how does a show built on two guys bickering end up as a business asset worth fighting over? Simple. It found an audience, and it kept that audience coming back week after week. Wave isn't buying a podcast. It's buying attention — real, measurable, repeat attention. And in today's media world, that's worth more than a polished studio pilot nobody watches twice.

This isn't actually Wave's first move with this duo. Santino already brought his solo show, "Whiskey Ginger," over to Wave earlier this year. By his own account, the experience was good enough that when it came time to think about "Bad Friends," there wasn't much debate.

"I've had such a great experience with them on my other show," Santino said. "We can't wait to keep making comedy for our fans for many years to come." Bobby Lee put it a little more bluntly: "We know we're in good hands. Mostly, we're just excited to keep making the show we love, at a heightened scale and bringing our fans along for the ride."

Mack Sovereign, Wave's Chief Content Officer, said the relationship with Santino made the next step obvious. "It became clear pretty quickly that we were aligned on how we think about creative and growth," he said. "So expanding the relationship to 'Bad Friends' felt like a natural next step."

Here's the part that actually matters for the show's future: Wave will now handle advertising sales and distribution across YouTube, podcast platforms, and social channels. That's the unglamorous machinery behind any content business — the deals, the placements, the platform strategy — and it's exactly the stuff that two comedians bantering into a mic usually don't want to deal with themselves. Hand that off to people who do it for a living, and you get to focus on the thing that actually built the audience in the first place: the comedy.

Wave isn't some scrappy startup chasing this deal out of nowhere, either. The company was just named to Fast Company's Most Innovative Companies of 2026, and it's racked up more than 6 billion impressions over the past year working with pop culture figures, creators, and athletes. This "Bad Friends" deal fits a pattern — Wave finding creators who've already built something real and giving them the infrastructure to grow it without losing what made it work.

What strikes me most about this whole thing is how familiar the path feels, even outside podcasting. Start with curiosity. Do the thing because it's interesting, not because there's a business plan. Keep doing it long enough that people notice. Then, when the right partner shows up, scale it on your own terms instead of someone else's.

I've built things that way myself — traveled the world since 2017 without a corporate playbook telling me the "right" way to do it, just following what made sense at the time. Santino and Lee did the comedy version of that. They made something because it was fun, kept at it, and now they're taking it further without changing what it is.

Santino's represented by UTA, Lee by CAA, and the show presumably keeps rolling out new episodes while all this gets sorted out behind the scenes.

The real question now: what happens when two guys who built an audience by just being themselves suddenly have real infrastructure behind them? We're about to find out.

Source: podnews.net

Our last article on this: The Podcast Impression Is Breaking Down — And That's Not Necessarily Bad News