FLASHBACK: The Power of Media w/ Steven Barlett

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I want to welcome everyone to the Media Roundtable podcast.

This is a special edition because we're going to give you something that most people don't get to hear.

We're going to let you get another free sample of our chief audio officer summit this year, where we had the largest leading brands in the space who hold this whole place together.

And to kick off the summit, I was joined by my partner in crime, Connor Doyle.

Now, just picture this beautiful sunset, Terranea Resort, sunny Southern California.

And we had two very powerful guests come to talk about something that doesn't get enough airtime, and that is the power of independence.

Independent creators are really what built this whole ecosystem.

They're what stood it up.

And the biggest shows that you probably listen to most likely started as independents.

But it's important that we give them some love and shine light on them because they are really the beacons of free speech, of independent thought.

And it's important that we not only have great big platforms and networks for people to sign on to for tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, we need to support those independent voices that are trying to maintain their independence.

So, we had two of the leaders come in, two names you might have heard before.

Maybe you've heard of Stephen Bartlett from Diary of a CEO and Ben Shapiro from The Daily Wire, two names you've likely heard of if you have been paying any attention to this industry.

So, if you care about this industry, you will care about this conversation.

And I can't wait for you to take a listen.

Here we go.

One of the things that struck me about the Daily Wire is how much further you'll go for your brands in the way that you do business.

And, you know, I think Flight, it's so great that you're both here, you know, just sharing the different approach that you take as an independent.

What are some of the things that you see your company doing for brands or you're doing individually that you don't see when you check out other shows?

So first of all, I love when I'm able to do ad integration.

So right now, one of my favorite ad integrations is Perplexity.

So we have a big contract with Perplexity.

And I actually do use Perplexity in my everyday life because I'm in the informational business.

And so in the middle of the show, I'll break into the show if I have to look something up.

Like the other day, I was critiquing Gavin Newsom suggesting, the governor of this August state, my former state.

And Gavin Newsom had suggested that California is a net tax donor, meaning that people pay more in taxes in California than they take out in taxes.

And I was pointing out that that's actually really a dishonest statistic because it is taxpayers in California who pay the taxes and it is

people who are generally not paying taxes who are taking out the taxes.

And so you can't really attribute any of that to Gavin Newsom's policies.

If a bunch of rich people live in California and pay taxes to the federal government, that has no correlation with being a net tax recipient state.

The state is not paying taxes.

In any case, I looked up on perplexity in the the middle of the show, what percentage of all welfare dollars in the United States go to California?

And so I'll stop in the middle of the show and I'll say, and now I'm going to check out with my sponsor, Perplexity, what percent?

And then I'll read the answer on the air and we'll put up on the screen what that looks like, right?

That's a great way for the audience to familiarize themselves with the product and to see that actually how it works.

We've done this with Bolin Branch as well on a completely different, you know, on a completely different note.

Bowl and Branch were my favorite advertisers.

They're wonderful.

I literally do travel with their product.

They're that good.

And so we made a point of that during our election night broadcast.

It was getting very, very late.

I was very tired.

I just took out a blanket and curled up with a Bullen Branch blanket in the middle of the broadcast and sold them a lot of blankets.

They're good blankets.

They are fan.

They're fantastic.

They're great.

Really good.

Go to Bullenbranch.com forward slash C-A-O.

So you've had some offers, I imagine.

I don't know if we've talked about it, but

I would imagine that the usual suspects have wanted you to fold the daily wire in, in, right?

And you've now,

you're like a grandfather in this industry, relatively speaking, right?

10 years in podcasting.

Why haven't you done it?

Why didn't you take the check?

Well, if I were a host alone, I might think about it.

But the reality is that I'm not a host alone, right?

We built an entire company off the back originally of my brand, but it's now a much larger company than that, right?

Our hosts include people ranging from Matt Walsh to Jordan Peterson.

It includes, we recently signed Isabel Brown, Michael Moles.

So we've built the brand out to include a wide variety of contents, which is why the company is a lot bigger than just me.

One of the things that we wanted to do in the early years was ensure that we weren't a one-car crash company, right?

If I got hit by a car, then not everybody lost their job all at once.

And so, by the way, policy genius.

Anyway,

the

reality of building a company means that it's very important to keep the independence.

And so I think that's the real reason why we always had bigger aspirations than for me to just be a show host.

Okay, this is where I want to hear from both of you.

We've talked about the things you get out of staying independent, right?

But beyond the money,

what is

the price that you pay for being independent?

What are the challenges that you have to face off with?

And I'd love to get both of your perspectives on it.

But the things

that you have to overcome because of the decision that you've made and and the offers that you've said no to?

I mean, the most obvious one is just peace of mind.

Meaning, obviously, when you're the person who's responsible for 250 employees, then you have to make the call every single day as to whether some people are going to keep their jobs, lose their jobs if the market goes up, if the market goes down, if it suddenly becomes soft, if people turn off politics for several months because an election is over and now it's the summer.

That sort of stuff has real ramifications.

So just the, I would imagine that the stability of just receiving a check in the mail without having to think about that very often must be incredibly comforting.

Also, in the space that I'm in, it's not just that the business is volatile, it's that politics itself is incredibly volatile.

And so,

I mean, obviously, the old Yiddish curse says, may you live in interesting times.

And we certainly are getting the old Yiddish curse, right?

I mean, we're living in very, very interesting times, which is good for our business in one way, meaning people want to listen and hear what the hell is going on.

And it's very bad in another, which means you can wrongfoot yourself so easily in this moment moment when everything is incredibly volatile and when all the lines are being erased and redrawn almost every day like an Etcher sketch.

And so because of that,

the amount of

time and worry that you put into everything that's being said on your platform, every development, every tech development, the lead time on what you're doing, all these elements, they keep you up at night.

I mean, this is the thing that I think we all understand because we're all in business is that actually, you know, being in business,

far from being solid and easy, it's incredibly difficult just because if you care about your employees, if you care about the people who work for you and what you're doing in the world,

you're losing sleep for sure.

Yeah, I agree with everything Ben said.

And what he was describing is just the difference between being a founder and an employee, right?

So there's trade-offs you make, and one factor in those trade-offs is you're going to have to bet on yourself and take a greater share of the sort of risk equation.

But for that, the upside potential is increased.

And I think the other part of your question, which is why, what do you lose about the point of independence is I just really love doing this.

So I want to be able to do this for the next 30, 40, 50 years of my life.

And I've, in my first iteration of my career, between the ages of 21 and 27, when I built that business, I gave up so much control that at some point, other people made decisions which influenced how much I loved showing up and doing it every day.

So because I found something in my life that I actually want to do for 50 years, I've learned from that to keep control of that thing in my hands, which might mean going doing three episodes a week, or it might mean doing one episode a month, depending on what I've got to do to stay in love with this.

But I want that control.

And I actually think for my advertisers, for my partners, for my team, it's in everyone's interest to make sure that I can control at least my show to the point that it stays within, it stays my ikigai.

That's the kind of way that I look look at it, that Japanese proverb of something you find that's like remunerative, you're good at, it serves the world.

This was my ikagai.

And actually, five years ago, when I was running that company and it was publicly listed, I said that my last dance in my life would be building a media company.

And so I know for sure that I'm going to design this company in a way where I can do it for 50 years.

And that is independence.

But that with that comes, as you say, betting on yourself, which I'm fine to bet on ourselves.

Yeah, you're okay.

Yeah, I'm really

figured it out to an extent, but it's stressful, right?

And so,

you know, Stephen, you, you had a social media company.

Yeah, I mean, you, you, like, this, this, what we call podcasting, you might call it a show, you might call it something else, but there's something

it feels like both of you made a decision that that was going to be the anchor, even though it's not the only channel you're engaging with audiences on.

It seems like that's home base.

Am I making an assumption because I am biased toward it, or is that an actual like, is that how you see it

I mean as far as the podcasting sphere yeah I mean for sure for sure what's closest to my heart I my show is me I am my show I mean the way that I talk to people in real life is the way that I talk to people on the show which I think is why the show is successful I think that the shows that aren't successful are the ones that are not like that where suddenly you become mannered and you can tell the inauthenticity I think the podcast medium is amazing at stripping away inauthenticity.

That's why I think people really like it so much.

But yeah, I mean, that's the thing that still gets me up every every morning.

It's still where I spend the majority of my time.

It's why there's a division in our business and how it's run, right?

I don't actually have a formal title with my company.

I'm a co-founder of the company, but I'm not a president, CEO, or COO, right?

We have people who do that.

Well, and you got books, you write articles, and, you know, you've used, you use all the mediums, right?

But

what is it that you feel like this does

that others do not?

Well, I mean, I will admit that I do love writing.

I love, love, love writing.

I love writing, but because I I like sitting and contemplating and listening to brahms while I write.

But that's a different thing.

Don't we all?

I'm a violinist by original trade.

But

what this allows me to do is speak into the thing that people want to hear.

And I think that that's really important.

The reason that you get into this is not just because you want to say something.

It's because you want people to hear something.

And

if you're...

The biggest mistake I think that people make in the podcast industry is focusing more on what they want to say than on what people want to hear.

And there I don't don't mean that you should cater your message to the audience, that the audience should have control of you, but you should, what people typically want to hear from you is the thing that you're good at, right?

It's the thing that they find most interesting about you.

And so what I've found, I've tried a bunch of different things.

What people want from me is an authoritative take on the news.

More than anything else, when people are very, very confused about what's going on in the world, because my show is an information first show, if you listen to it, despite all of the actual stereotypes about the show, the actual show is extremely information heavy.

That is always my fallback position.

This is something I learned from talk radio, right?

When you're on talk radio and you're talking for long periods of time, there comes a point where you run out of things to say and you look and it's dead air and there's still a clock running.

So where do you go?

So every talk show host has a place that's like their safe space where they go.

For some people, it's making jokes.

For some people, it's anger.

They ratchet up the volume.

For me, it was always information, like more information, more information.

And it turns out that that's actually what people want from me, is to give information authoritative takes.

And so this is the place where I can do that.

And it allows me, it's a window into everything else I want to do.

I know more about things because I have to learn about things in order to speak authoritatively about those things.

I have to read four to six books a week just so I can speak about the things that I want to speak about.

And so, I take what I do really seriously.

I think there are a lot of people in my industry who don't and who are without criticizing specific names who are engage in conspiratorialism because for the sake of that and because it's fun and because it's cotton candy.

And I don't like that because, again, I think that's not what it's for.

And me?

Oh,

yeah, the medium of, I think, the once upon a time, I was making Face, when I was running, back and when I was running my marketing company, I was making Facebook watch videos that would do tens of millions.

Or I remember that the furthest reaching was 33 million views.

And it was a two-minute viral video back in the like Facebook viral days.

And if I would go out on the street or I would speak to my friends, nobody ever mentioned them.

I never went outside, even though those two-minute videos were doing tens of millions of views.

And no one ever came up to me and said, I love those surface-level viral videos you're doing.

And then because of that, because I could see that the world was going more ephemeral it was getting the media was getting shorter and shorter it was still at that time quite polished I believed that polls rise together which is when I don't know when digital music explodes vinyl records come back in and in terms of supply and demand I think there was a real there was a growing absence of depth and that's actually the space that Joe Rogan was occupying he was occupying that more deeper a stronger parasocial relationship longer form so that's why I started the diary of a CEO and in that first episode that did a thousand downloads mainly mainly my friends and team members, I got more feedback than anything I'd ever done in those viral Facebook videos.

And for me, I enjoyed it more as well.

And those two factors of

depth and enjoyment, like depth, you could, you could say a proxy for the word like impact, impact and enjoyment are the two signals to follow.

But in life, so I, so I did that.

I stopped my Facebook page, which had a million followers, didn't post another video and focused on the diarrhea.

And I think about this all the time with the future of media.

I think what are the platforms at the moment and channels offering the greatest depth and the strongest parasocial relationships in a world where AI has entered the room and it's going to make it really, really easy for a kid in Yugoslavia to make video and audio now.

So if there was ever a moment where depth and parasocial relationships to another human being are going to be more important than ever before, it is now.

And so as a side thought, that's mulling.

And I was actually talking about with Caroline before I walked on the stage.

This is why we're seeing such success with streamers.

Streamers, I was with a streamer the other day and I was like, so tell me about what you do.

He was like, so what I do is I wake up in the morning and I turn the camera on.

I was like, then what do you do?

He goes, like, nothing.

I was like, so how long do you sit there?

He goes, eight hours.

And I'm like, so what are your audience doing?

He's like, 18.

I was like, what are your audience doing?

He goes, they're sitting there with me.

So what do you guys do?

We watch sometimes I'll put on Judge Judy because there's no IP rights on that on YouTube and we'll watch Judge Judy together.

I'm like, so how many kids are doing this with you?

He's like 170,000 tuning at the same time.

I'm like, this is the extreme example of what I'm talking about with depth and parasocial relationships.

Then you see Speed or Kai Scent go out in the street, and there's a hundred thousand kids in the street because they have the strongest parasocial relationships and the most depth.

So I think podcasting occupies that space as well in a world full of like TikToks and Instagrams that you cannot remember.

Even like a simple example of this is you probably can't remember the last thing you saw on Instagram, but you can probably remember the last thing you watched on Netflix.

And that just shows how I think depth is disproportionately valuable.

And that's what podcasting has ridden.

Technology came along, smart cars and all these things, streaming devices, the commercial infrastructure, which has accelerated.

And I think of myself as being quite lucky that I was hanging out on that wave when that wave came into shore.

But yeah, it makes sense.

And this is also how I think you predict what's coming next.

You bet on the strongest parasocial relationships with audiences and the thing that's offering that sort of the most depth.

We'll get some more on this in a moment.

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Okay, we've been talking a lot about independence, right?

And, you know, one of the things I think about is, you know, you guys are at the top of the game being independent.

And, you know, everybody loves to talk about Rogan Rogan, right?

And the reality is, like, let's remember, he was grinding in his living room for a long time before he was relevant to any of us.

And I think about Ashley Flowers, who was, you know, our opening conversation last year and the fact that she, you know, believed in herself, took the only $13,000 that she had and put it all into launching Audio Chuck.

And

she's got

by some measures, you know, 8 million downloads

happening.

So her reach is so powerful, you can't even conceive it.

But

people start, even if they're not independent today, most of the ones that we talk about started as independent.

So I would ask you both to share your like unvarnished thoughts with a group of advertisers about how they should think about independent when it's so much easier to just call a couple of places and check the boxes on the usual suspects that didn't go that way.

Well, to Stephen's point, I mean, the

independence in this moment is a good marker for a lot of listeners and audiences of authenticity.

People want to feel like they're not just tuning into an institution.

They want to feel like they're turning into a person.

And if that person feels like they work for the man, for lack of a better term, then audiences may feel like, okay, well, that advertiser is with that program specifically because that advertiser wants to be with that large institution.

And you see this manifest politically all the time.

It's a very anti-institutional moment.

And because it's an anti-institutional moment, I think that gives independence a unique power to be able to say, listen, I'm saying stuff that sometimes you're going to like and sometimes you're not going to like.

And that's how you know that when I say that I like this advertiser, I actually like this advertiser because you know that I'm going to say things you don't like sometimes.

And that independence really, I think, is a unique thing in the space for sure.

Yeah.

And I was thinking about analogies as Ben was talking about like your

that wonderful family-run restaurant in your city or village versus the chain.

And I think there's it's analogous because

if you want to have a closer relationship with the creator or the media owner and you want to do things that are more innovative and that therefore potentially yield higher returns, like we talked about experimentation and testing the ad creative and being more dynamic and moving faster, and then having a longer, deeper, more guaranteed relationship where you can get to know each other and each other's company and products, and you can make one plus one equal three.

Then, I think working with independence is the way forward.

And it's actually what I was saying,

and I was trying to say it in the most polite terms as I possibly can.

One of the other reasons we chose not to, I think I did actually say this,

become non-independent is because ideologically, there was a lack of innovation, speed,

there was a complacency, there was a disregard of data, there was a

romance, a romantic attachment to like the way it's always been done, which I which I'm like allergic to.

I have like hay fever and I'm allergic to that as well.

And it would ruin my love.

It would ruin my love.

It would make me sad.

I would not like my life anymore if I wasn't working with a partner that could move at that pace and that was excited about trying new things.

So, yeah.

Last question.

Some of the people here already place ads on both of your platforms and

some don't.

You inherit this copy a lot of times.

You get a request to run an ad for a brand

and then you hear from people like us or from the brand direct about what you should have done or how they want you to do it different.

Let's flip the script.

We're going to do a little more of this tomorrow.

What do you want to say to the brands?

What advice do you have for how they can work with creators like you

to really maximize the value of the transaction?

I was like, Stephen, in the back, and I was thinking how brilliant what you're talking about is the sort of intimate relationship with the brands.

I think that the message to advertisers is twofold.

One, get us really, really familiar with your products.

Like, really let us know your product.

And then the second half of that is, and then let us cook.

You know your product better than we know your product.

And it's your job to help us know the product almost as well as you know your product.

And we know our audiences better than you know our audiences.

We're talking with them every single day.

And so this sometimes ends up with like bizarre conflicts where an advertiser will have an ad that absolutely hits a home run because I didn't listen to the copy.

And then we'll get a call and the person will be very upset that I didn't listen to the copy because they're very attached to their copy.

And it'll be like they got twice the response on this particular ad because it was funny, right?

Because it was off the wall or off beat.

And then the best advertisers are the ones who see that and then they adjust.

I've mentioned Policy Genius a couple of times, mainly because they allow me to do this.

Policy Genius, I did for, I don't know, a year.

I would start off my ads.

It's a life insurance company, right?

And they sell life insurance.

And so how do you make that interesting to somebody, life insurance?

So what I would do is I would take like a very creative death and open every ad with an incredibly creative death.

Like you're walking down the street and suddenly you look up and a piano is falling from a third story.

And in that moment, as it falls down toward you and you realize that your life is over and you're about to be just completely destroyed by the Steinway, you think to yourself, Shapiro was right.

I totally should have visited Policy Genius.

And I did this for like a year.

And I started using movie deaths.

It was like, you know, your father is the king of the pride and you are the up-and-coming prince.

And you're watching your father.

And he gets in a fight with your uncle.

And as he's falling, he's about to be trampled by a herd of wildebeest.

You think, man, I wish dad had listened to Ben Shapiro and gotten.

Policy genius, right?

Like that sort of stuff.

Advertisers, I think, should look very much at the results that they're getting from the ads as opposed to sort of believing that they're they're that their brand is not durable enough to take the humor or take the creativity most brands are not only durable enough to take it they're enhanced by the the creativity of the hosts who play with them yeah I completely agree and I would say don't guess and we don't have to guess anymore so we can we can you know we're more than willing to run multiple creatives on our testing platform and see what performs the best and the metrics that matter to you and what I ran and I spent seven years running a marketing company where we booked three to four thousand influencers a month so I've been on both sides of the equation.

And I would say,

I would ask the creator to tell me first what they think the ad should look like, because I understand that a Mr.

Beast, who's a friend of mine, he knows, he knows, because he's Mr.

Beast, but most creators know their audience better than

me as an advertiser will know their audience.

And also

if they're really close to their audience in the back end, which they probably are if they've grown big,

they really, really, really want to make a great ad, which isn't going to cause their audience to leave.

Because if 5% of my audience leave because I ran an ad at minute 32 in my episode, that negatively compounds and might mean that I don't get recommended on the algorithm.

So what our interests are fundamentally aligned.

And I wish, if I'm being completely honest, I wish advertisers would come to me and say, Stephen, this is our business.

I wish they'd show me their business, everything about their business, what their objectives are.

And say, Stephen, you spent 15 years making adverts.

You spent 15 years working seven days a week, obsessing about audience and retention in the first five seconds and drop-off rates and all these crazy things.

What should this ad look like on your platform?

And can you make it and show it to us?

And I would make it.

And I'm more than willing to make yours as well.

And I'm willing to test both of them before they go into our media on any metric you care about.

And then,

you know, you can decide.

Because I think that the data would shout so loudly that you would ultimately want to go with our with our version.

We've actually, just to close off on this point, I have a second second channel called Behind the Diary, Parasocial Relationships, Building a Bigger Audience.

It's behind the scenes.

It shows my life.

And Will is running it with his team.

It's just hit 250,000 subscribers today.

And the advertisers on that channel, we said from the start, let us make truly exceptional ads.

So Descript, one of our partners, I probably wasn't supposed to say that.

And Descript's really easy to use.

I love it.

I've used it for a long time.

So I'm going to jump out of a plane.

and use Descript in the air before I hit the ground from 13,000 feet.

And we're going to, that's the ad that I wanted to shoot.

Now,

typically, you get like a 30, 60 second host read.

I don't think I'm going to lose a single person when I jump out of that plane.

We will see.

And when I get that data back, I'm willing to show all of you that that was a much better way to sell D script subscriptions and also retain my audience till the end so my AVD is nice and high.

And that's what you don't get with programmatic.

I just want to say, guys,

thank you for your generosity.

Thanks for your independence.

Thanks for showing how much passion you can really bring to advertisers in this marketplace that's so rare in the world that we live in.

So thank you.

Thank you so much.

Thank you so much.

Thank you.

Thanks, Dave.