Special: Richard Hatem's Light in the Dark Tour 2026

**Scott Philbrook** (0:01)
Astonishing Legends Network.

**Richard Hatem** (0:13)
All right. So ladies and gentlemen, we're here with Scott Philbrook, as you know, and we're talking about the Light in the Dark Tour 2026
Now, what you might be thinking is, wait, didn't you do the Light in the Dark Tour last year? Well, yes, I did. But I didn't go to every city on Earth. I went to like three places. Yes. So now I'm going to new places, new cities, and so I will be doing the same secret show. It'll be an episode. It's just an episode I've never recorded, never will record. It's the live episode. And so if you want to hear it, you go to the live show. That makes sense, right?

**Scott Philbrook** (0:55)
Yeah, I think it makes sense. I think the scariest part is that there hasn't been Light in the Dark for almost a year. So people have really been left out in the cold.

**Richard Hatem** (1:03)
That's right.
The light's coming back. As summer ends and we get into the fall season, the light in the dark comes back. So yeah.

**Scott Philbrook** (1:12)
Yes.

**Richard Hatem** (1:14)
So Scott, here's what we're going to do on the show that we're doing right now.
You'll ask me questions from your heart about what's coming up in the tour. And then I'll tell you, because of course, it's I wake up in the middle of the night screaming thinking about it.

**Scott Philbrook** (1:31)
Well, yeah. So let's talk about that. So last year, it was a lot of East Coast stuff. You're moving to a different part of the country this time, right?

**Richard Hatem** (1:37)
Yeah. We're doing Midwest this time. Because here's the thing.
And I don't know if you know what you're like. Do you know what your top 10 cities in America are in terms of listenership?

**Scott Philbrook** (1:51)
I haven't looked in a while. I mean, of course, LA and New York are on there, and I think Chicago is too. But I'm not sure where the next seven or eight are.

**Richard Hatem** (2:00)
Okay.
Mine are very consistently, because I'll look for the total for every single episode we've ever done, the full numbers. And then I'll just look episode by episode on a given day. And it's pretty consistent. LA is number one, then Chicago is number two. And I don't know why.

**Scott Philbrook** (2:24)
Right. Right.

**Richard Hatem** (2:25)
But I've got a ton of listeners in Chicago, and I don't really know a ton of people in Chicago. So that to me is fantastic.

**Scott Philbrook** (2:33)
Yeah.

**Richard Hatem** (2:33)
Then it's followed by Seattle and Portland. Oh, okay. And then the fifth one can be almost anything. Sometimes it's Texas.
Sometimes it's Pittsburgh. Sometimes it's New York. New York actually weirdly is not reliably even in my top 10 So I don't know what that's about.

**Scott Philbrook** (2:54)
Oh, interesting.

**Richard Hatem** (2:55)
That's interesting.

**Scott Philbrook** (2:56)
You know, when I used to look at those stats a lot, and we did a lot for several years, and especially the geographic ones, it always fascinated me. But there was a time where one of the partners of the company, the last place I worked in New York City, which was a commercial and music video post-production house, one of the partners there who started that company, there was only three guys, had left the business, and he and his wife, they had a loft down below, well, I'm not going to say the street because I'm going to say who bought it. They had a loft in lower Manhattan that they sold to Emily Blunt and John Krasinski, and then he sold out his piece of the partnership, and they bought a sailboat and went to sail around, literally around the world, which he was certified to do. This guy was hardcore, and I'm talking, and the boat's like 40-some feet, whatever, but he was listening, they were listening to the show because we had just kind of started it and everything, and I used to go, and there would be one listener at Easter Island, and it would be, I knew it was him, and because he would have a satellite link or whatever, and I could almost track where they were as they were going around the world by the one person listening in some tiny island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, which was pretty cool.

**Richard Hatem** (4:04)
So that's amazing that Audio Boom, I guess it's Audio Boom that knows where it is. I don't know how it works.

**Scott Philbrook** (4:12)
Yeah, I don't know how, I was surprised too, but like, you know, and this was a while back. We're going on 13 years now, I think. So this was probably in like our second year or third year, but like, yeah, because they finished, and then they sold the boat, and now they live in a place that looks like an AI postcard.