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Many people who I respected were disappointed when I started 'Wine Library TV.' They thought I was dumbing down wine, but I always knew I was one of the biggest producers of new wine drinkers in the world, and people are realizing it now.

Winelibrary.tv was about building personal brand equity. It was a business move. Now, it was totally surrounded by a passion for wine, but I very much gave a lot of thought to doing a sports-video blog instead.

You know, if a TV show dropped into my lap out of the blue, I would have a hard time turning it down because there just isn't the money in theater that there is on TV.

2006, I started 'WineLibrary TV.' To build 'WineLibrary TV,' I started using Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter in 2008.

If I were to leave Congress and want to start Farenthold TV, it would be very difficult. The fewer players there are, the fewer the opportunities to build a big enough audience to get on.

Obviously with the Internet and increased access to other means of watching shows, the audience has dispersed and is all over the place and that is a challenge.

At the end of the day, TV is supposed to be entertaining. But it's important for me that there's some take-away value from it.

The only way I would go back to hosting would be if it were something entirely new. It would prevent me from wanting to host a standard-fare kind of talk show.

But HBO is less interested in how many people are watching than in how much the people who are watching are liking the show. They didn't set up their business model to make writers happy. It's just a nice unintended consequence.

Every show I play, whether it's for an audience of 15,000 or 50, I look at it as a party, and I'm the host.