PBD Podcast - Steven Bartlett REVEALS the Secret Behind the World’s Fastest Growing Podcast | PBD Podcast #861

Episode Date: September 24, 2026

Patrick Bet-David sits down with Diary of a CEO founder Steven Bartlett to unpack the systems behind his explosive growth. Bartlett reveals how relentless experimentation, AI, audience ownership, recruitment, and small improvements helped build his media empire, and why the creator economy is about to change radically.----🎥 GET THE VAULT 2026: https://bit.ly/4iPHrNX👞 Get the NEW Billionaire Suede Loafer: https://bit.ly/4ym5oRA👕 SHOP THE ICON COLLECTION: https://bit.ly/3TuUU3xⓂ️ CONNECT ON MINNECT: ⁠⁠https://bit.ly/4kSVkso Ⓜ️ PBD PODCAST CIRCLES: https://bit.ly/4mAWQAP👔 BET-DAVID CONSULTING: https://bit.ly/4lzQph2🥃 BOARDROOM CIGAR LOUNGE: https://bit.ly/4pzLEXj🇰 KALSHI: ⁠http://kalshi.com/pbd⁠SUBSCRIBE TO:@VALUETAINMENT@ValuetainmentComedyABOUT US:Patrick Bet-David is the founder and CEO of Valuetainment Media. He is the author of the #1 Wall Street Journal Bestseller “Your Next Five Moves” (Simon & Schuster) and a father of 2 boys and 2 girls. He currently resides in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. He currently resides in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida

I probably shouldn't say this in front of this many people because it is a bit of a secret, but I guess I can't be fired. Everybody wants to find out how the hell he's doing it. They call him the science of podcasting on track to be the number one podcast in the world. But who is Stephen Bartlett prior to Diary of the CEO? I think at some degree we're all driven or dragged. And I think for the first probably 25 years of my life, I was dragged. 15 years old, I realized that I'm not going to go to school anymore.

And I start building businesses. went from being dragged by the shame to being very much in the driving seat. Stephen Bartlett. Stephen Bartlett. Stephen Bartlett, everybody! Check out all new episodes of the time! Things that are easy to do are also easy not to do.

Just fucking do it. Do you think you're that duplicatable that you can take anybody and cause them to go from zero to 10 million subs? You've built a really, really, really great foundation, and then you go up and you'll build something that is built to last. So I think we've proven that we can do that multiple times.

You got the childlike smile on your first. faced right now. So what do we get excited about the future? This is a controversial opinion. All right. That's one secret. We got out of the guy. You can tell he's brilliant, but my God, he's likable. So I'm going to do something I've never done before. So I'm going to ask an indirect way of helping our guys, our production team that works so hard get a raise. Do you want to help him get a This is how you can help us out. 49% of you watch our podcast that our editors work so hard. Producers, cutters, all of them.

Our production team, 32 of them that work here. They work very, very hard to deliver a good quality to you. If you enjoy our show and you want to help this thing get bigger so we can take our talent that we have in-house that support this production all the time and maybe even give them a raise, then please subscribe to the channel that allows us to get more viewership

and indirectly, it makes bigger opportunities for our current team that we have. Thank you so much. Stephen Bartlett. Great to have you here. Thank you for having me. Very excited. It's truly an honor.

I've been watching your content and to see you go from, like, who is this guy? $1 million, $2.8 million. You don't look at his channel, 5.2 million. You don't look at his channel for a few months. 7.9 million.

You look away for six months. 11 million. I'm like, it's going to slow it on. 17 million. 19.6 million. on track to be the number one podcast in the world. Stephen Bartlett, Diary of his CEO's show, but you're also a founder, entrepreneur, businessman.

There's a lot of things people don't know, and his company, steven.com, if I'm not mistaken, please correct me, just raised around at a valuation of $452 million or $450 million, where you still are holding 90% equity in the company, give or take, and you've had exits in the past before. So with that being said,

For most of us, we know you as the guy that does incredible interviews. But who is Stephen Bartlett prior to Diary of the CEO? First and foremost, thank you for giving me your time today. I really appreciate it. I think some of the important context is the first, from 18 years old when I dropped out of university, to 27, which is when I stepped down from the company that I had founded, which was a public company at that time,

I was learning how to grow up hack audiences on the internet, and I was running a team of 500 people. So 21 years old, I found the company, 27, I stepped down. I become a dragon on Dragon's Den. I'm now doing Shark Tank here in the US as well. But it's important context, because people will know me as a podcaster. But through most of my 20s, I was running a very, very big team of people. I was living in New York City, London, Berlin, and Los Angeles.

And so really what I did is I ported over the skills that I'd learn about growing audiences into this medium called podcasting. So I kind of had a bit of an unfair advantage in that regard, because 25 years old, we probably have 100 million followers across channels that we own and operate. So we were running a big business, a big media company when I was 24, 25 years old. So there's a lot of background context. And really, you know, I learned principles through my 30 about how to build something, whether it's teams, whether it's how to innovate, whether it's media. And I've really just been applying those to the medium of podcasting because I believed in it.

So, yeah. So let me get the straight, the 100 million followers. So you're managing these accounts. And on the back end, you're seeing the mistakes, things they're doing right, turned the knob a little bit this way. It worked too much. It didn't work. That's literally...

So you're on the back end studying every algorithm, everything that's going on. Yeah, so we owned those channels. They were across Facebook back in the day, Snapchat, Twitter. So they were our channels. We produced all the content on those channels. Are you on those videos or no? No. It's faceless.

Yeah, faceless. Okay. Yeah. And it shifted to being creator-centric, which was the only real change, but the principles of scaling an audience or storytelling or understanding algorithms, they remain largely the same. And the thing with me, as you'll come to see,

is I don't think in terms of tactics or strategies, I think about principles. So if you think in principles, it doesn't matter that the world is changing a rate of knots that it's changing at now. The principles should hold really irrespective of what business you're in or what you're trying to do. And so, yeah, everything for me is about principles,

about first principles. Like, what are the first principles of solving this particular problem? That's the way you go. So when you're doing this, you're seeing all the faceless, 100 million channels, 100 million subscribers that you guys are managing. What made you say, I think I can go from faceless to be in the face? And a brain like yours, you could have gone a lot of different directions to make a lot of money because that brain is an analytical brain that can go create products, do all this other stuff.

Why choose to start a show? What was the thinking behind that? So 27 years old, I stepped down as CEO before the company, about to uplist to another stock market. I asked myself at that point, if money is no problem, what would I do with my time? It's the middle of the pandemic. It's 2020, I believe.

And my answer was that there was this thing called a podcast, which I'd done once or twice, which I really, really enjoyed. So a lot of it was driven by just what would I do if I had no money, if I had no need for money? And then also in that year and a half, at 19 years old, I was working in San Francisco in Silicon Valley. When I was 27 and I had this year off, I went and worked in biotech for a year and a half working on IPO.

because the biotech industry didn't understand the skill set of content and storytelling. This was around the time that GameStop had collapsed, and the whole sort of finance industry got really obsessed with retail investors. I've worked in so many different industries. Podcasting in particular was based on a set of principles. At the time, back then in 2000, I'm going to say 2019, Facebook were paying a lot of money for creators like me to make very, very short videos.

And it seemed like the world had orientated itself towards lots of views, but shallow impact. Everything was about one-minute videos and two-minute videos and three-minute videos. And also, another important principle that sat underneath this decision, was you were algorithm-dependent. And having ran a big media company

through my 20s, I could see a trend year-over-year, which is that myself and all my competitors were losing roughly 50% of our organic reach a year. So essentially, if you're investing in something and you're losing 50% of your returns a year, it is like it's an unstable way to make an investment. Everybody's going to get zucked eventually. That's what we call it.

We call it getting zucked. It's this slow loss of your audience because they have to put more ads into the feed and they have to do a bunch of other things. So the decentralized platform that offered depth for me was podcasting. And then I sat down with my team and I remember being sat in the room and saying, I want to start a podcast called The Diary of a CEO because it felt like a juxtaposition. Whose diary on planet Earth would you most like to see inside? Who has the most secrets, has the most information,

but also in terms of, again, this is another principle, in terms of supply and demand, there was a lack of supply of people in high places being vulnerable and honest and open. So I thought that was an interesting juxtaposition. And then off we went, and it's pivoted and experimented its way to what it is today. Did you think when you started like,

because you have that previous background, where you're like, I know exactly what to do, I know exactly what we're going to be doing, I know the trajectory, okay, so that wasn't the case. Maybe share the learning how you went through at the beginning. Yeah, and this is maybe like the first really critical principle, which is if you listen to futurists like Ray Kurzweil, who've done a pretty remarkable job of predicting the future,

one of his central predictions within the moment we find ourselves in, is that the rate of change in the world is going to accelerate, i.e., if you're 10 years old now by the age of 60, you'll experience a year's change in roughly 10 days. If you're 40 now by the age of 60, you'll experience a year's change in roughly 90 days. This means that the correct answer to anything you're contending within your business, how to do marketing, how to make content, I mean, we're seeing it before our eyes. The correct answer is going to change faster than ever before. So how do we operate in such a world where the correct answer, even in your personal relationships,

You just think broadly, the correct answer is going to change. So how do I find the correct answer? This is the first principle question, before my competitors. What are my options? I can buy one of Patrick's wonderful books. Problem with Patrick's books, if they're not written on principles and tactics and strategies, is that they take about a year to publish. These books, they take quite a long time to write and then a year to publish.

I could come to talks like this and hope that someone like me or another creator is going to hand me the answer. The problem is that answer will only last. for three, four, five, six months in the world that we're heading towards. So instead of me giving you a fish, the fishing rod, which will allow you to find the correct answer yourself, faster than any of your competitors, is quite simply your rate of experimentation and failure.

Quite simply. And this is not something that I've come up with. If you read through Jeff Bezos' shareholder letters going back to 2015, he is clear. He says, Amazon will win if we are the best place on Earth, to fail. If you look at how booking.com, the hotel booking platform was built, they used to argue over the right decision, and then one day they made a bet that they would build an experimentation platform to kill the guesswork. Actually, that phrase killed the guesswork is one of

the popular phrases in our company. We have a head of failure and experimentation. We have an experimentation team, and their sole objective isn't to be right. It is to increase the whole organizations rate of trying stuff. At Amazon, you probably don't know about the fire phone because it failed. You might not know about their shoe business because it failed, but you probably know AWS. Jeff Bezos is clear. He says, one in ten will pay for the graveyard. And when I think about the growth of my show, it's the one in ten that have warranted me the introduction that Patrick just gave me, where he said, you know, two months ago, we added a million subscribers in 30 days. This month will add probably about 6 or 700,000 subscribers,

which is about 6 or 7 times faster than any other show that we see. And it's not because I'm asking better questions. To me, that's a total commodity. It is because if you looked at our rate of trying things, put simply, across every single team, we are arriving at the right answer to any question as it relates to podcasting faster. And my team, very simple metric,

increase the rate in which our teams are trying things through the scientific method, hold all variables, change one, come up with a hypothesis, understand what we're measuring, and then report back to the entire company in our central Slack channel. What happened? And if it fails, great. If it succeeds, great.

But the key thing here, if you're going to implement this in your business, is one part of this framework is controllable, which is the input, getting my team to try more, and the other part is uncontrollable, which is the output. If you incentivize the output, you disincentivize the behavior, because people will get scared. They'll get scared of being wrong. The very fact that it's an experiment means they don't know what's going to happen.

So I stay out of the business of success and failure, and I'm purely focused on increasing the rate of experimentation. And listen, I can tell you more case studies through history of the greatest companies in the world, how they've all arrived at the same conclusion that you don't actually have to be that smart in life. I'm actually not smart. A kid expelled from school, went to university for one day, not good at math, not good at English. So I think in principles that would get me to the right answer faster than my competitor, And this idea of failure and experimentation is central to that.

Stephen, that's fascinating. Would you mind giving us a case study? Give us a case study of something you guys tested that failed? And then you're like, we're not doing this. I mean, every day, there's probably 10 or 15 things a day. But there's sort of an adjacent point, and I'll give you an example here. There's an adjacent point, which is another principle in our company, so also another Slack channel called 1%.

I read a book that changed my life when I was 18 years old by Jeff Olson. Jeff Olson? it was called the slight edge. And the case it made is that in business, also in life, and everything else you care about, things that are easy to do are also, by way of that, easy not to do. So people don't do them, i.e., brushing your teeth is easy. It's also therefore easy not to do.

Saving a dollar is easy, so it's also easy not to do. But the book makes the case that in every facet of your life right now, it is compounding for or against you, based on how important you think those small things are. And your money, your finances, they all follow this perfectly predictable graph. It looks like this. It's slow and invisible, and then it's fast.

But it can work against you. It can be slow and invisible, and then fast compounding down. Your teeth are a prime example. If you didn't brush your teeth this morning, you're fine. Don't brush your teeth every day this week. Maybe the person next to you, your wife, your kid's going to explain, you know, that dad,

your breath stinks or something like that. But you're still going to be fine, no pain. Don't brush your teeth every day this month. I guarantee you, no pain. Don't brush your teeth every day for five years, and you're sat at a dental chair as the dentist is pulling out your molars. When did that happen? It happened today with a decision that was easy to do or easy not to do,

like brushing your teeth. Every part of your life, your skin, your hair, your relationships, your podcast is currently on this curve that is invisible in the near term, then fast. And the dire of a CEO is a prime example of that, completely flat for three years. And then this explosion upwards. Why? Because we have this thing in our company called the 1%.

We obsess over the smallest possible things that we think all of our competitors will ignore. And the crazy thing is when you start experimenting with small things, sometimes when you turn over small stones, you win big prizes. So coming to your question, there was a 10 second change we made to the dire of a CEO that increased our growth rate by 180%. Now, think of it. about that. People think the key to being successful in podcasting is these big leaps forward. We're going to get Barack Obama or Donald Trump to come on the show. That's what they're all

aiming at. The crazy thing is when you orientate a team of people to big leaps forward, they are few and far between. So they get demotivated. And the psychology and the studies are really, really clear here. I remember Harvard Business Review took a room full of people like this, and they gave all of them a work diary and said, track every day in work. At the end of the week, they said, point at the day where you had your favorite day in work. People pointed out a day where they had even a tiny feeling of progress. So whose team's going to be more motivated? You, your team, who's trying to book Barack Obama to come on your podcast, or my team, where I'm orientating my team towards buying a CO2 sensor for the diary of a CO set, because we found out that if it

goes above a thousand parts per million, it's like having one or two pints of beer. And then when Jemima put the candle on the set, and Daniel, like, the founder of Spotify, walks in, and he goes, it smells so nice in here. And Jemima and the team share that on the Slack channel. Jemima gets this huge round of applause. Or when Israel Adasanya comes on the show, and we've researched the music to play for the guests that will relax them so that we can have the type of conversation we want. And Israel, Adasania walks in and says, man, Nipsey Hustles double up.

This takes me right back to my childhood. My team are always experiencing that progress principle, we call it. They are always stacking these tiny winds. And to go to this point, that's why we think there's no experiment too small. And we stay out, again, of the business of thinking, you know, what experiment is worthy. They are all worthy. Some of the smallest changes we've made to the show have had the biggest impact. And I'll give you another sort of idea on this.

I interviewed Sir David Balesford, who is known for turning around the British cycling team. He's the first chapter in James Clare's book Atomic Habits. He went into the British cycling team when they were the worst in the world. They were depressed. They were being mocked by the press. And what he did is he banned them from thinking about the podium. And he got them utterly obsessed with 1% gains. This is how the whole James Clare's book Atomic Habits came to be.

It's the first chapter. That's my friend, Sir David Balesford. He obsessed them on tiny, tiny things that their competitors would overlook. How big are the bottoms? Can we get 10% more water in the bottles? How soft are the pillows in the hotel? Now, you know, we all kind of understand this idea of marginal gains. Some of them end up not being marginal.

You find more of them because they're easy to come by, and all of your competitors in any industry you're in will overlook them. But the interesting thing he said to me was, when I first came into that British cycling team, they were leaving the office at 5pm. He goes, when we started stacking up these tiny, tiny wins. when we started getting interested in things that were so unbelievably petty, he said people stopped leaving at 5 and started leaving at 1 a.m. in the morning.

He said, we felt like we were going somewhere. That is the progress principle. If you want to create a team that is compounding, that has a sense of momentum, that ends up winning on this graph, you have to get obsessed by the smallest possible things. And that's the secret. It's so funny, like, I can go on any stage in the world and tell them the secrets to why we'll probably hit 50 million subscribers in two years.

That's what the graph says. It's these things. But people won't do them. Because you almost have to have a religious belief to be that obsessed with changing the scent in a studio or measuring the air pressure, the air conditioning, or doing 350 AB tests with Facebook ads for every single person we interview. If Patrick came on my show, we would AB test his name 50 times

to see how people want to introduce him. That's the game. You know, how duplicatable you think. Okay. When I sell my business, I want the best tax and investment advice. I want to help my kids, and I want to give back to the community. Ooh. Then it's the vacation of a lifetime.

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Ontario. This episode is brought to you by Animals. How far would you go when someone threatens everyone you love? Who can you trust? From Academy Award winner Ben Affleck, Animal stars Affleck, Carrie Washington, Gillian Anderson, and Stephen Young. When a Los Angeles mayoral candidate's son is kidnapped, he and his wife are pulled into a web of deception, forced to make choices that could tear their world apart. Watch Animals only on Netflix on October 9th. Rated R. I think you are. Dificatable? Yeah, so meaning, let's just say you have a show.

I think you were on the apprentice of UK, if I'm not a mistake. Not a apprentice on the shark tank type of a model or whatever it was. Yeah. So if somebody, ABC came to you, CBS came to you and they said, hey, Stephen, I want to do a test. We want you to take five people that are decent communicators. Yeah. And they come and work for you. And we want to see how quickly you can take their YouTube channel to 10 million.

If we do, we're going to give you $100 million. What, I'm just making this up. Right? Do you think you're that duplicatable that you can take anybody and cause them to go from zero to 10 million subs? We've kind of proven this. So we signed someone called Paul Brunson and his shows growing faster than mine was at the same stage. And that was my bet. We started a company called Flight Story. We now have 150 people full time in the company. And the bet was can we take other creators, give them our blueprint, and would it work? And I said that to say that it's not me as an interviewer that is resulting in the success. of the show. You're seeing the tip of an iceberg there, and there's this whole system built

underneath. Even with our guest selection, we built something called guest radar, which means that I can go on there and type in the word Iran or business. It looks at every guest that's ever appeared on any show in podcasting's history. It's plugged into the back end of my channel, and it will tell me that you should get Robert Pape to come on. He will perform 3.1x. So the approach that I take to problem solving is I try and remove romance from it as much as I possibly can. I don't think that I'm the special thing, and I try and build a system that will kill the guesswork. So I think we've proven that we can do that multiple times. So what's more likely to happen?

Is it more likely that you stop diary of a CEO the next 10 years, or more likely that you develop an agency, almost like a media company where you have 50 people you build to do this, where you don't have 50 million subscribers or 100 million subscribers? You've got a couple billion subscribers on all your channels combined. What's more likely to happen? I will continue to do the diary of the CEO for the next 50 years. I've set, I've, this is, you know, I'm really obsessed with this idea of long-termism. And we will scale our, continue to scale our media company Flight Story, which now has, you know,

probably about 30 or 40 creators signed to it. Yeah. And we own the hosting platform that's the biggest creators in the world used to host their shows. So Alex Somozy, Cody Sanchez, Simon Cynic, they all host their shows on Flightcast, which is the hosting platform we've built. which gives them some of the tools that I've talked about here. But again, yeah. So what's the vision? What's the vision along? You just said 50 years. So there's got to be a vision that because you've got the childlike smile on your face right now.

So what do you get excited about the future? Yeah, so I've got this childlike smile on my face just because in this season of my life, I've started thinking a lot about this idea of long-termism. It is somewhat inspired by people like Elon Musk who continually took a long-term approach to solving a problem. And the crazy thing is, when you start timeframes in your life determine behavior, let me give you an example. My friend is 39 years old. I just called him for a FaceTime a couple of weeks ago and I said, I shan't say his name. John.

I said, happy birthday. And in the conversation, he said to me, he goes, Stephen, he's single right now. He said, Stephen, I will not be dating this time next year. Right? What he's done there without knowing it is he shifted his goal from find the right partner to find the best person I can within a year. And what will happen is what's always happened in my friend John's life

is he will rush, he will overlook red flags, he will make a bad decision, and then he will end up back single, which is he will waste time trying to save time. Another thought experiment about how time horizons determine behavior, if I gave you 60 seconds and unlimited bricks

to build the highest tower that you could, what you would do, logically, is you'd get the bricks, you'd turn them, stack them vertically, and go up as fast as you can in the 60 seconds, right? And then if I blow, the tower falls down. If I gave you unlimited bricks, but one year, your behavior changes. You start stacking them horizontally.

You build a really, really, really great foundation, and then you go up, and you'll build something that is built to last. In that example, you see how Elon has bought all of his businesses, like SpaceX and Tesla, you know, reinventing a brand new battery, building out the charging network across the United States when he could have just used someone else. When you think in long term, when you have this thing we call long termism, you make different decisions that create a more durable company,

but actually an even bigger moat. So the reason why we built our own hosting platform and we've done a lot of the things we've done is because I'm thinking on 10, 20, 30, 50 year time horizons and I want to build the world's biggest creator media company. I don't even need to add the word creator that. I want to build the world's biggest media company in this industry. Creators are these decentralized media assets,

and I want to build the infrastructure for them to be able to scale and own and grow their businesses. And it's not going to be just shows. Are you thinking movies? Are you thinking shows? Are you thinking like, you know, episodic type of thing you put on that? Is that what you're thinking? The medium, unless I'm not romantic about the medium.

I really want to support this new type of biological asset called creators who now have, like you, they have the reach of the biggest media companies in the world, but they haven't got the infrastructure of a CNN or a Fox. They don't have the commercial. They don't have the data infrastructure. They don't have the sort of back office infrastructure. And it's so clear to me what's about to happen in the creator economy.

You're actually all creators now. You all have the same enough tools because you have an iPhone to build and scale distribution. And I would say in the world we're heading in where it's going to get even easier because of AI to make things, whether it's software or content, it's really that distribution that's going to matter the most. I do want to say something to you guys because I've not said that you're not saying

I've not said this publicly before, but it's very front of mind for me at the moment, which is if you think about the principles of what's going on with AI at the moment, and if you listen to Mark Zuckerberg's earnings call three weeks ago, he said that they're now taking every single thing you post, and they're running it through an LLM first, an AI, they're learning about the context of the video that you've posted,

and then they're using that context to target it better at whoever wants that particular piece of content. What does this mean? It means your follower number or your subscriber number is going to matter increasingly less. Think about the incentives. Mark Zuckerberg has quarterly earnings. He needs to report on how many ads have been sold. Why does he care who chose to follow you? He cares about retention, platform retention.

And that is going to be better served by using an AI to matchmate content. This means that the most important thing as a business owner who has an audience on the internet is sovereignty. Sovereignty. This, I think, is the word of the next decade. For anyone who's got an audience on the internet, is do you own the relationship with your audience? Not does Mark Zuckerberg own it.

Mark is, I consider him to be a friend, I guess. But do you own that relationship? It's the most important thing. We used to think of social media as the bottom of the funnel. Like, I'll collect Facebook likes and Instagram followers. In the world we're heading towards, it should be seen as the top of the funnel, and your owned environments have to be the bottom of the funnel.

The other principle here that's going to hugely impact this is now a kid in Mumbai or Manhattan can churn out huge amounts of content while they sleep using agents, which means that in a world where attention on social media is fixed, according to the Financial Times and many other reports, and there's this sudden supply shock, unlimited infinite AI slot,

that means that every unit of content and its view potential is going to fall. So, you know, again, if I was starting a business today or a creative business today, I'd be doubling down on both sovereignty and any type of content that is irreplaceably human. What does that mean? Like any type of content that's what? irreplaceably human. Irreplaceably human.

I'll give you an example. Please. So just a high-level idea here. Are we still going to watch the Formula One if they remove the humans from the cars? my answer would be no, because there's something in watching Lewis Hamilton come down the backstretch against Vastappin. There's the emotion, the psychological resonance. You look at that, and as a human, you can relate to that feeling of competition, of loss. You wouldn't have that if you removed the human because of that sort of those psychological factors. So if you think about what I do as a podcaster,

sometimes historically, I've thought of my role as being to share information with you. The gut has 38 million bugs in the gut microbiome. I think you're now going to be able to get that information from an AI. What will you still want from a human? You will want that layer of lived experience, of relatability, which AI can never give you. So one of the types of content that I'm really bullish on going forward as a creator is this like, I call them human documentaries.

And so we've built an in-house team that produced these human documentaries now. I actually think it's going to be bigger than my podcast. The early signals suggest that. And it was funny because Jimmy, Mr. Beast, who's a friend of mine, he released his first vlog seven days ago. And I thought to myself, oh, it did 20 million views. I thought this is the bat signal. The more human, the better.

In your newsletter, in your podcast, whatever it is, if there's not a layer of lived experience, you should assume the value of the thing is going to decay. And I mean, you're a prime example of this. You have a story of overcoming, of coming here and building an incredible business. I don't think as we look forward into the future, it's going to be the tactics people want. I think they're going to want the tactics wrapped in a layer of the human stuff, the emotion, the struggle, the mental health, the dealing with my wife when I pursued this

and she didn't think it was a good idea and my friends disowned me and they criticized me. I think that human layer is really the best of the next sort of decade or two. So that's what I'm doubling down on. That's fascinating. But make some noise because that's good news for lack. He's saying he's team human. And trust me, he's human. This is not an AI.

He's a real human being. So what do you think, what do you think AI is going to do to the space of podcasting and creating shows negatively and positively? So, okay, let's start positively. The cost of production is just going to continue to fall. So that's like no longer going to be the moat.

So people like me and Patrick, one of the moats used to be that we could afford the nine cameras and the production team and all that stuff. One of our early tests recently, we built this thing called Agent Editor, and what it does is it takes the nine cameras we shoot my show on, and it edits the three-hour conversation within 20 minutes. And we continually tested it to see if it could beat our human editors.

And after about four months of testing this, the average view duration on the AI-edited podcast beat the human-edited podcast. So again, the production side is going to collapse. The thing that I think people like me and Patrick will still have as a moat is Patrick will still be able to get some of the biggest names in the world to come and sit down. Not every show on earth can get Trump or whoever it might be to come and sit down. Trump might only do five interviews. So that's still a bit of a moat.

Where it will change podcasting for the worst is if you're in the business of just delivering information, I think your days are numbered. And one of the principles we have in our company is about being highly unromantic. Like, highly, highly unromantic. I am so romantic about the impact I have, and I have zero romance about the way in which I deliver that impact. So if the data shows that an AI is better than me at doing what I do, I will move out the way.

And you have to be, I think I'm romantic in a world that's changing at this speed. What else is it going to do on the downside? I think things like this are going to become even more important. I actually don't think all of you are here today to just get information. I actually don't think that's why most of you are here. I think most of you think me, you know, maybe you could have gone on the internet and found out Patrick's principles or principles of building business. I think there's something else which is fundamentally Maslowian and you're not going to evolve out of, which is human connection. You know, if you starve a human of connection, they lose their mind. That's what solitary confinement is.

So how can these mediums double down more on that feeling of connection or creating IRL experiences like this? Yeah. And then I think, yeah, the sovereignty point comes to mind because the algorithm is going to get more aggressive. Every single year in January, I do this analysis where I look at the variance of views between, like, say Patrick's best performing episode and his worst performing episode,

and the gap is getting bigger. The variance between us, and all that is, is the AI being more of an aggressive sorting hat. TikTok is the prime example. The reason TikTok works so well is it was the first algorithm that just said, I do not care how many followers you have. you can have 100 followers. If you make something interesting,

you're getting 5 million views. And if you're Gary Vaynerchuk and you don't make something interesting, you're getting 2,000 views. It's going to continue to go that way. So this is why this point of sovereignty is mission critical. It's going to be the big thing everybody regrets not taking more seriously

because they were hooked on these free views that these algorithms were giving us. But if I look at some of the biggest podcasters in the world now, down 60%, down 70%, down 80%, and they all wish that their metric of audience was actually how many email addresses and address and credit card details do I have, not followers. I'm really uninterested in the moment in followers alone.

What's your method of extracting that content? When you look at your flywheel, how are you extracting your subscribers off of YouTube or Spotify to a different place? There's lots of different ways. I think you have to have an offer. You have to have a transaction. You have to have an event.

You have to have a newsletter. And one of the things, you know, I probably shouldn't say this in front of this many people because it is a bit of a secret. but I guess I can't be fired. No one's going to do that. Is I'm really interested now in physical post from a creator perspective.

So the reason why, like, 10 years ago, no one was talking about newsletters. It was all about Facebook likes, right? And the reason why we got really interested in newsletters and substack and beehive is because you can't get zucked there as easily. and email are existing rails that all of you use for work, so they're not going anywhere. So if I think about existing rails that all of you use and that aren't going anywhere, physical post is one of them. You're always going to need somewhere to have your Amazon parcels delivered.

So over the last couple of weeks, we've been midway through an experiment now, where I ask my audience, would you pay to receive a package, a physical package in the post from me? In a world that's becoming, again, this is irreplaceably human. It is me betting again on depth. It is for a generation of Gen Zs who are getting obsessed about the physical and the tactile. They're buying phones that don't have screens. They're like inverting because through history,

what you see is poles rising at the same time. When fast food became a big thing, and ultra-processed food became a big thing, everybody got obsessed about organic food. When digital music took off and iTunes took off, vinyl records came back in. And so the same in a world of retentive, algorithms and digitalization and phone addiction, the opposite.

Silence retreats, no phone retreats, sewing clubs. Things like this are going to get more popular. And so with those principles, I go sovereignty, check. I go, generations are increasingly wanting the physical check. Is it going to survive? You're always going to need an address. So post. And a lot of DTC brands, some of the most exciting DTC brands in the world,

are seeing some of their best returns, not coming from Facebook ads now, but in my portfolio, I have about 100 investments, A lot of them are DTC brands. They're seeing some of their greatest returns coming from post, sending postcards from the founder to their customers with a discount code. So at the moment, I'm midway through building a platform to allow creators to design and send post to their audience. Yeah. All right.

Well, that's one secret. We got out of the guy. Data. When you think about the evolution of what data matter 10 years ago versus today. Oh, my God. You know, never make a video over 12 minutes. That's why your views or drops. of a sudden Joe Rogan is doing three and a half our podcast, it gets 20 million views.

So what data used to matter 10 years ago that it doesn't matter today? And today, if you were to say the top five most important data, I measure when I do, show what are they? When I do a podcast or just generally? Just generally. I would say the most important signal I would be looking for if I was starting something new, whether it was a business or a podcast, is like value. you per minute. And I say this because, you know, when I started the podcast, I remember a guy

called Alex sitting me down in 2017, roughly 2018, and explaining to me with perfect math that a podcast like mine could never possibly make money. I ignored him. I remember 10 years earlier, a guy called Gordon sitting me down in London at Google Campus and showing me these Facebook pages that I'd started to build in my business called Social Chain, a chain of social media pages, he proved to me mathematically that it could never make money. I ignored both Alex and Gordon. And the reason I ignored both Alex and Gordon is because money is a lagging indicator of value.

And also, weirdly, if there's no skepticism and no pessimism surrounding your idea, it's one indicator that you might be a little bit late. So the thing you focus on in all of these moments is like, Did you guys catch what he said? You know, please repeat that. Like, because I remember, I remember walking into, I've never said the name before, but I remember walking into a meeting with MTV in London when I was,

I must have been like 21 years old and trying to tell the executive at MTV to start a Facebook page. And I remember being like laughed at, mocked, I remember the meeting lasting half the time it was meant to and leaving there. And they was concerned that they would have a Facebook page, their content would go viral and they couldn't control it. And in every good thing I've done, it was initially met with high degrees of pessimism, which were actually an indicator that there was something novel or early in what I was doing. So that's one indicator.

The other is just when I started the diary of a CEO, my friend Oliver, one of my best friends who would tell me if something was shit, and my friend Ash told me it was good. And then when I stopped doing it for a month, Oliver came to me in the office. He worked for me at the time. And he said, when are you going to do that podcast again? I was listening to it on my commute. And these are people that would be honest with me. So, you know, they often say in business

when you're building a product, if you just make something for one of your friends that they absolutely love, the truth is there'll be more people like your friends out there. And that's what I've always done. Even with translations on the diary of a CEO, so 30 million people will listen this month

and in language that's not English. And they'll listen for longer than they did in English, which is remarkable. We started that experiment two and a half years ago, and it failed for about 18 months. We actually teamed up with Spotify to do it. And that failed as well. And I carried on doing it because I knew that at some point the underlying technology would get good enough and that it would unlock 90% of planet Earth who didn't

speak English. My CFO, my finance team told me it wouldn't make any money. We don't really care about, you know, they said, you know, what about this country? There's no CPMs. This is like how you get paid in ads in this country. But I've always ignored it. Deliver value for people, deliver them good things and the money will take care of itself. And now when I look at our revenue from these other languages. It's in the seven figures. In this experiment is now the fastest growing thing we did in the history of our show. Okay.

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There's another principle that I think it just came to mind because it reminded me of the battles that I've had through the last 15 years with different people. It's this idea called paper walls. And this is another Slack channel in our company. It's called pushing on paper walls. And if you go through history and you think about how great companies were built

like Tesla or like Zara, at the very beginning, there was a founder who pushed on a wall that everybody else in that industry thought was made of steel or concrete. If you think about Omancia Ortega, who was the founder of Zara, He was a railway worker's son, had never been in a fashion industry before.

And when he came to the fashion industry, I think he was in Spain, he said, why does it take nine months to make these beautiful Italian shoes? Why does it take nine months to make clothes like this? And people said, well, we make them in China. We design them in January. We send the order off to China. It takes nine months for it to be shipped across the world. And that's just the way it's always been done.

And Amancy Ortega said, why is it done that way? And they said, well, this is just the way it's always been done. You have to kind of be a savant in the fashion industry. You have to guess in January what people will want in September. He said, why? And they said, that's the way it's always been done. He was a bit of a disruptive founder. So he said, well, why couldn't I just put the factories here in Spain?

They said, it would be too expensive. He said, why can't I just train my shop floor staff to watch every single day what people are actually buying and wearing and send it straight to the designers that same day and get them to sketch it and have it on the rails within 10 days? They said it's impossible. Amanti Ortega is a prime example from history of someone who just pushed on walls and figured out that they were actually preference and tradition.

And through history, whether it's Elon or whether it's someone like Roger Bannister, by the way, that's exactly what Zara, this is why Amanty Ortega is worth 180 billion. He did exactly that. He built the factories in Spain, way more expensive, but guess what happens when you build them in Spain? You can ship clothes faster, which means that people are more likely to wear them because they're currently in fashion. Smaller lines,

you train your shop floor staff to sketch what people are wearing that day and get it made within 10 days. It built one of the biggest fashion businesses in the world. A manseer's worth 170 billion. My other example of paper wall pushing comes from running. A guy called Roger Bannister in 1970. Part-time runner, everybody said you can't break the four-minute mile.

Roger Bannister, a very, very stubborn guy said, why? Scientists said your lungs will explode. He said why? Roger Bannister trained himself. By the way, no one in history had ever broke the four-minute mile. Roger Bannister trained himself in April in 1978, I believe it was. He ran the world's fur. He broke the four-minute mile for the first time. This isn't the story. The story is that within days, 11 other people had broken it. What does that say about the constraints and the limitations that every single person? Another example, Bernard Sadow. Up until I think it was like the 1970s-ish, no suitcase on Planet Herve had wheels on it. Do you know why? Because everyone said people don't want wheels on suitcases.

Men wouldn't be seen dead pulling a suitcase. How emasculating. And this guy called Bernard Sado was in an airport. He saw a trolley with some wheels on and said, why can't we put some trolleys on this suitcase? Back then, remember, bellboys and train stations, people were blowing their backs out. there was a whole industry designed to protect this paper wall. People would carry your suitcase for you on your back. He took this idea to a shop, they said absolutely never. Eventually, he persuaded one department store to let him sell his suitcases on, which he'd literally just taken off his wardrobe at home, to women.

They agreed. They marketed it to women, and within days, there's a queue around the block of men buying all of these five of suitcases. And now 99.9% of the world's suitcases have these wheels on them. I say all this to say that in any team that has this paper wall question, we call it, which is just to ask why whenever you're presented with a constraint that looks very real, I ran the numbers from my team and showed them. You'll need, over the course of five years, if you just find a couple of these breakthroughs,

you'll need a team that's 50% smaller. You'll learn over those five years 170% faster. You'll discover things almost 200% faster. And I'll give you one more example because it's very relevant to me as a creator. We have this guy called Tom. I'll call him Tom. He's been working with me for four years across multiple companies. He's out in the Philippines. He's the world's best animator. Tom takes nine days to animate a 30-minute video for us, right? Nine days. That's what he said to me.

We realized we wanted to launch weekly on my channel behind the diary. So I said to Tom, what would it take? Originally asked him. I said, how long would it take? He said nine days. And then because we had this paper wall idea front of mind, I said, Tom, what would it take? to do it in two. Do you know what Tom said to me? I've been working with him for four years. He said Steven, when we set out to create a shoe that blends comfort, function, and luxury, we had the choice to make it fast, we had the choice to make it cheap. We chose neither. Instead, we chose Tuscanyahu. We chose true Italian craftsmanship, each pair touched by 50 skilled pants. We chose patience, spending two years perfecting every detail,

and we chose the finest quality at every step, introducing the Future Looks Bright collection. Not rushed, not disposable, not ordinary, rather intentional, luxurious, timeless. I just need a new laptop. He said, I'm working on an old laptop. He said, I'm spending, he goes, five or six of the days of me just rendering the stuff. He goes, if you bought me a new MacBook for $2,000, I can do your animations in two days.

This guy's worked for me for four fucking years. But this is the remarkable thing about paper walls. People themselves don't know they're trapped inside paper walls. You are currently trapped inside a bunch of preferences and traditions that you have accepted as immovable constraints. And actually, innovation, company building, all these things. we say we care about are often just the byproduct of going up to something that is preference and tradition and pushing on it to check it's real.

Asking why. So one of the questions we ask when we interview people is a paper-will question. It says you've got this event taking place in six weeks time. The supplier tells you it's going to take eight weeks to get you the stuff. What do you do? Scale back the event? Do you push the event back two more weeks so that you can meet the eight-week deadline? Or, and these are the people we hire, ask the supplier why it takes eight weeks.

Push back on them. And this is what we find. This is what Elon did with Tesla. Everybody said, you can't make a fast, cheap electric battery. Elon said, why? And they said, well, they cost $600 on the market. He said, what are they made out of? They said, metal, zinc, copper, iron.

He said, okay, where'd you buy that as cheap as possible? And then he reasoned up to a battery that was 20% of the cost. You have to be a paper wall pusher. And teams that are, teams that have that culture of not accepting the constraints, more productive, learn faster, more innovative, and everything in between. So we drill that into our team.

And every day in our Slack channel called Paper Wall, someone will be posting in even the smallest paper wall, even the smallest thing. And it creates a culture of not accepting constraints. Fascinating. Let's talk about the... Make some noise. Yes, yes.

So in the process, let's go through the process. Let's just say you already explain how you choose Robert Pape, like the guests you choose to be on a podcast. Okay, so that part makes sense. Now you do the interview. walk me through your prep. How do you prep? What are the prompts you use?

What do you do to come up with the questions? Then the props, you use a lot of props, right? You bring props under shows as well. Then after the interview, is it take the transcript, put it in AI, give me the best stories, what scores the highest, eliminate anything below seven and a half out of 10, cut those out, have a better opening. Walk me through the cutting. Walk me through the entire process.

Yeah, I have to start with this guest selection point because it might sound like we just pick guests that are going to perform the best, but that is a violation of this principle I talk to you about long-termism. So there's kind of three circles that overlap. One of them is, do I think my audience will like it? Do I think the algorithm will like it? And then the most important that relates to long-termism is do I want to have this conversation?

Why is that so important? Because if I'm going to do this for 50 years, like I told you, I was going to, then I have to wake up every day and look at my calendar and love my life. which means sometimes, my team will say to me, I wish I could show you the list of noes on my list. They'll say the biggest person in the world, biggest movie star in the world, the leader of this country,

170 million followers. And if it's a violate, if I'm not interested, I don't care. Because the game here is to go long. And going long requires me to love my life. In terms of like, one of the interesting things on my prep is that I've never in the history of the show ever written a question down.

Never, ever. Never intend to write a question down. The research process is me getting really, really curious about this person. And then I think great interviewers, they don't lead, they follow. And I've had these great examples of me sitting down in the chair and asking someone an opening question. I remember this one example, a guy called Chris Kamara. I came downstairs, walked into the studio, sat down.

He's a very famous guy in Europe. He's one of the world's leading sports personalities. And I asked him the first question, and he couldn't speak properly. And I didn't know that. He has a disease, which means that he's basically losing his ability to speak. So you've planned this interview. Imagine if I'd plan that interview, and all these questions I wanted to ask,

obviously within 10 seconds, the whole conversation becomes about the struggles he's having and how that's destroyed his confidence. He built his whole career of being able to speak. And now this disease has taken away his ability to speak. That conversation was so impactful, so profound, that that weekend across football stadiums, across the entirety of the Premier League, they had banners up saying,

you're not a fraud kami. Because he's in the conversation said, I feel like a fraud. And so I've got so many examples from the history of my show, but also watching other shows where people, everybody in this room hasn't had someone listen to them for 10 minutes in their life uninterrupted. So people will subconsciously take you to where they want to go if you just listen.

And my job is basically to follow them. I actually learned this from spies. This is actually quite a good negotiation, sales trick. Quite interestingly, there's a guy called Julian Treasure, who's done two TED talks. One about speaking? 50 million views. What about listening? Two million views. What does that say about us as humans? But when you sit with spies, and I know me and Patrick have both,

interviewed spies, they all say that the most important thing, Andrew Bustamante said, if you want to motivate or manipulate, it starts with shutting the fuck up and letting the person hand you their ideology. And he said that to me. He said in spy school, there's the framework to motivate, manipulate. This is good for hiring. It's good for sales. It's good for all of it. It's good for dealing with your spouse. Trust me. He said, reward ideology, coercion and ego. Rice. And he says, we think the thing people are most incentivized by is rewards, money, or in some countries there might be alcohol or drugs. He goes, the thing that drives people the most when you're a CIA spy is ideology. And he said to me, he said, everybody in this room has three lives. Your public life,

which is what, you know, you bring out in the street, your private life, which is what your partner knows about, and then your secret life. Andrew's job as a spy was to get into your secret life and he said he could get any secret from your secret life within nine months there might be spies here today he said he used to come to conferences like this and far away lands he'd bump into you when you having the coffee outside and then he'd bump into you a couple of more times over the next couple of months he would listen to you mike baker said to me when he was over in the middle east as a CIA spy he goes he'd get in a taxi where the taxi driver was driving a government official and he'd spend seven weeks just listening to the guy offload that is what i think is both the

art of great salespeople, but also a great podcaster, is let the person offload. And then in week eight, once he's figured out that your son has a knee injury and that you're worried about it, that's your ideology, that's the I and Rice, he would make you an offer to fly you and your son out of this country to get professional medical care in the US if you sell secrets on insert country. Reward ideology coercion and ego. Ideology is the most powerful. Number two, Andrew said, is ego. He said, we all have an ego. Even Mother Teresa has an ego. He said to me not just Donald Trump,

Mother Teresa also has an ego. Number three is reward, which is the things people want. And number four is coercion, which is pressure. So I apply this framework to everything in my life, especially when it comes to interviewing exceptional people in hiring. If you watch me in an interview with one of our big execs, we've hired some of the most incredible people in the world in my holding company. Leaders from Amazon, we just announced AADA,

who was at Amazon for seven years building their AI applications. She's joined as my CTO. I will sit in that interview for two hours, just letting the person offload at me. Tell me everything about your life, your ideology, the chip on your shoulder, the person that overlooked you in school. And then when I have that information, I can tailor my offer to your ideology. So that's what I do in the interviews. I let the person give me their ideology and I follow them.

During the interview, we have AI listening to everything that's being said, and we put a lot of that information into testing to understand the packaging. And yeah, and then once the interview is taking place, there's a huge testing process that takes place. And, you know, in the modern world, you don't have to guess anymore for creative decisions. You don't have to guess what your website should say. You don't have to guess what your product that's going into Target or Costco should say. You can test all of these things. And this idea of killing guesswork at all instances is foundational to my success in any creative discipline.

I remember one of the early podcast conversations I had with this guy called Mo Gordat. first time we ran a testing process to figure out how to package it, how to edit it. And the worst performing guess delivered 1%, let's just say 1% as a simple way to think about it. And the best performing guest delivered 20%. It's the same conversation. It's the same three hours that I spent. It was the same flight to get Mo to come. But the variance in performance, because I did a $100 test,

was 2,000% increase in performance. And so, like, some of you are going to write a book someday. Some of you are going to think about packaging for your new startup. Some of you are going to think about, I don't know, content decisions or whatever. What I would say is your first question should be, how do I test which one will perform the best? I have a book coming out soon. I ran 400 tests to figure out what my audience wanted the book cover to be before I put a pen to paper. And my audience, 14.8% of the time, clicked the title, just fucking do it.

So I looked at all of my notes, and I thought which 30 of these notes that I've written over the last four years would fit that book. I put the book together, but it didn't stop there. I then took the book. I had 3,000 members of my audience, receive a randomized chapter. We watched their eyes as they read the book, start to finish. At the end of the book, they say whether it was life-changing cliche, and then I deleted three chapters. Again, being unromantic, three of my favorite chapters. I deleted.

So my approach to everything is how do we call the guesswork? Because everything else is a tax on your potential. It's inefficiency, you know? That's, by the way, fascinating. So if you do, how many guys, if you want to ask a question, line up now, because we're only going to get a couple, I've been selfish, I've taken the entire time because I'm enjoying the conversation so much, and I could go for three more hours with you.

But if you do a two-hour interview, let's say it's exactly 120 minutes. what is the likelihood of this thing that's 120 minutes when it goes live and it's posted what do you think it'll end up depends on how good the conversation was give me best case worst case best case is 120 minutes best case 120 minutes so if it's phenomenal let a writ 100% okay so worst case okay when I sell my business I want the best tax and investment advice I want to help my kids and I want to give back to the community ooh then it's the vacation of a lifetime I wonder if my out of office has a forever setting. An IG Private Wealth Advisor

creates the clarity you need with plans that harmonize your business, your family, and your dreams. Get financial advice that puts you at the center. Find your advisor at IGPrivatewealth.com. I wouldn't put an episode out that was 60 minutes, so minimum I put out is like 100... Okay, 120...

That's too well. Maybe 100 minutes. Also, you only would cut 20 minutes. Yeah, I wouldn't raise something that was 60 minutes. Do you ever start your intro, and let's just say the intro, you look at it afterwards, scores very low. Do you cut it and say, we start in a different way? Yeah, we move things around.

You do move things around. Do you ever bring the story that's maybe in the 80th minute, 90th minute and put in the 10th minute? It depends if it fits the story on. But yes, I'd be, I'm totally unromantic about those things. It means all about serving the audience. Do you some parts not think about it because... Shall I give you an example. Yesterday I interviewed Dana White.

And I opened up about his childhood, but I often find that people, Dana's been very open that he doesn't like talking about his childhood. He had a very, you know, tumultuous childhood. His mother turned against him and wrote a book about him that is critical of him. His dad was an alcoholic, they divorced at seven years old. Both of his parents then died, Dana said on the record, he said in interviews, he didn't care when they died, felt nothing. But he's also said in interviews he doesn't like talking about his childhood. So if I walk into a conversation with Dana White and the first thing I ask him about, about is his childhood because that's the logical place to start when you're trying to understand

context. He's probably going to tell me to fuck off. And he kind of did, like, in a nice way. So I knew, I knew that I'm going to have to earn the trust to then go back to his childhood later. And that's what I did. So probably, I don't know, 75 minutes in, I went back and I pulled out the book that his mom had written about him that completely, like, says I was so disappointed in Dana. I don't know who he's become. Money has changed him. And I pulled it out. And I prefaced it by talking about some of my own struggles with my own mum, and I said, can we talk about this? And he opened up about it. And so I look at that

and go, actually, that section is really important context to go nearer the start. So maybe, you know, we'll move that closer to the start. And it will make perfect sense when you watch it. When you choose the intro and you take soundbites, what prompts do you use to choose? What soundbite makes it the best to put it at the beginning?

What's the science behind that? Yeah, so most platforms, most social platforms are driven by this thing called AVD, average of uteration, which is just how long people watch. That's a simple way to think about it. So if you want to maximize for AVD on TikTok or Instagram or wherever it is or on YouTube, what you need to do is make the promise you make to the audience,

which is the thumbnail of the title, delivered upon as soon as they click within the first 60 seconds, and then thereafter. So obviously what's happening with us is we're figuring out how to package the conversation, and then once we have that data back, we're then making the trailer so that we deliver alignment. If the episode says,

here's how to make a cup of tea, and you click it and it's a cup of coffee, you're going to bounce. That will hurt your AVD. So if we've discovered that the packaging people want is how to make a cup of tea, within the first 10, 20, 30 seconds, you have to start delivering on how to make a cup of tea

or else people will bounce and you'll hurt your AVD. Obviously, Mr. Beast is a prime example of this. The thumbnail in the title and the packaging will say, We locked 100 people in a private jet. The last one to leave wins a million dollars. And then the minute you click, there's no, hello, I'm Mr. Bees, welcome back to my... No, no, no, no, no, no, no. He goes, we put 100 people in that private jet, and the last one to leave wins a million.

He immediately delivers upon the promise of the packaging. And that's what creates high AVD. So, yeah, so the trailer, the intro is all determined by what won the packaging test. So is that... Would you put that as one of the most important things on how good the trailer? I just think all things are important. I really just think all things are important. So I really don't think there's one thing. And I know there's like a temptation to like one the one thing. This is why I think the actual principle here is just like deep, deep obsession with tiny details and a high rate of

experimentation. This sounds like a crazy thing to say. But outside of some like really important business things, like hiring and culture, which we can get into if you want to talk about that, and I have principles for that as well, the most important thing is just to care more than your competitors do about small details and try more things. I think I can win at any game as it relates to business, building a coffee business, starting a YouTube channel, if I just held onto those two principles. And it's like, I can say this to people because it's like people won't do it.

They don't do it. Because it's not tangible. It's like religion. It's like religious. You have to kind of just have faith. Because you'll do it tomorrow and nothing will happen. So this was fan to make some noise because... By the way, one of the things that let me just say this before, I'm going to come to you guys,

because I'm sure you guys want me to come to you to ask the questions. One of the things for me with him, 10 to 1, I've consumed his interviews where he's being interviewed more than his interview and others. I don't know if you understand what I'm saying. I'm more interested in how he thinks than how he interviews because it's fascinating. And I think one of your superpowers, and I don't know if you, would give a lot of credence to this, I would. You're extremely likable.

You are extremely likable. And do you guys agree or not how likable he is? You can tell he's brilliant, but my God, he's likable. So first question we're going to go to is Dan Martel. Dan Martel has a question for Stephen Bartlett. Go for it, Dan. Well, Stephen, your value per minute is off the chart, so thank you for being here. Oh, thank you.

Question when it pertains to talent, you mentioned AI. I believe I read a story. You guys ran a contest 60 days to try to get as many people to adopt AI, $20,000 prize. I think you guys claimed that it saved you $1.2 million in revenue, 60,000 hours, and obviously it was a success. Do you look at that and say, we need to hire less junior people and, or, you know, Senior people empower them with AI or maybe more senior people using AI. And what role do you think now you would just never hire again in the future? So we will continue to hire in roles where they require irreplaceably human skills.

When I went through my orchard after doing this contest and building AI agents across our whole company, we are part of our thing is about leaning into change. So whenever there's a change in the world, we all, in our company, we all, in our company, we, mess around at the frontier, that's what we call it. So we messed around at the frontier, we understood the tools. I then looked at my org chart and thought, okay, in a world of AI, like, you know, where do I need to continue hiring and where I don't? For my research team, I thought, well, my current research is going to be empowered,

so maybe that team doesn't scale as fast. And that's what's happening now. My current researchers are using a flock of agents to do the research across my show and all of the other shows that we run. As it relates to sales, interestingly, because as you guys will know, Sales are about relationships. I'm going to be hiring more there than anywhere. In fact, I'm halfway through a negotiation to buy a U.S. sales team here in the United States

because it's a relationship business still. You can't automate the fact that the CMO at Airbnb is going to give the money to the person that she has a relationship with and goes for breakfast with. And then, yeah, it's about the irreplaceably human, and it's a different skill set. What I will say is everyone in my company needs to be AI proficient now. And this has changed. When I'm looking through all of the applicants, have, AI proficiency is almost a non-negotiable now. And then I'd say I have a team of, I don't

know, 15 agents probably that are working for me every single day. I have one agent that looks at the back end of my YouTube channel every single day. It's downloaded all of my back-end data on my YouTube channel and it goes out scouting for guests based on the performance of my channel right now. And so every day, if I pull up my Monday board, if I have my phone on me, you'll see my agent is saying, based on the performance of all your interviews and your your interests and what your audience have said and the comment sentiment, you should consider these five people. And actually we booked someone yesterday that came from that.

I have one agent that's doing my chief of staff triage, looking at all of my inboxes, my WhatsApp, my I-Message, my two email addresses, my Slack channel, my Monday board. And every single day it's pulling it together. It's my chief of staff. And then I have my investment fund, interestingly. So we have a fairly big investment fund. We've done some big investment, SpaceX and Whisperflow,

and we invested in Grot before they, bought by Navidia. We have Lenin Katniss, they're called. From that movie, Lenin Katniss. I don't watch movies, so I don't know, but some of you all know. The one with the Hunger Games. Len and Katnis do inverted jobs. Katn goes out into the world, Katnis goes out into the world

and finds targets for us to invest in all day, every day. And Len is on the receiving end of processing the inquiries we get for our investment fund. This has meant that our investment fund, which is now, you know, a nine-figure investment fund, has one employee. It's had one employee for three years. Because Molly sits there. She's from Boston Consulting Group.

She just, you know, she's managing Lenin Katniss. So the world is changing. The crazy thing is I thought I'd be hiring less, but that doesn't seem to be the case because I'm just doubling down on the human. You know? Love that. Thanks for that. Thank you. Fantastic.

Right here. First and foremost, I want to thank you tremendously for sharing all these golden nuggets. I mean, it's been, I can't express upon you on words on what I was feeling when you were talking about the different models. And in my head, I was just already at 150 miles an hour. And I did read your book.

I thought it was fantastic, arguably almost as good as your next five moves. But besides that, you started saying, you started the conversation, I'm really not a smart guy. I think everybody in this audience and everybody that follows you who could obviously argue against that tremendously. I'm very curious, genuinely curious. a lot of your things you're saying are surrounded by frameworks, models, principles, and things like that. What was it that happened in your life, because you're a fairly young guy?

What was it that happened in your life that turned you into the beast that you are today? Right. What was it? There has to be something. Stephen A shared last night at the CEO session. What it was that happened to him that turned him into that thing that made him motivated, the thing that happened to Jordan, the thing that happened to whoever it was. what was that thing for you

that turned you into where you're at today? So just thank you so much for that. That's a compliment. So thank you for that. When I say I'm not a smart guy, like I'm objectively not smart. Like if you look at my grades in school and how much I struggled

and then they kicked me out of school, they unexpelled me. My headmaster's been on national TV and said this. He only unexpelled me because I made the school a lot of money. Very entrepreneurial when I was younger. The great news is in a world where the correct answer is changing this quickly.

Nobody is really that smart. And actually, those that are trying the most things and doing what I said about increasing their rate of failure are the smartest. And I love that about the world. I love that the answers to, like, building a podcast or building a business are new now. And it doesn't matter if you went to university 13 years ago. It's the great leveler. To your point about the drive, I think at some degree we're all driven or dragged. And I think for the first, probably 25 years of my life, I was dragged.

Like, the way I described that is there was something in me that was dragging me and it was probably shame. context, I was born in Africa, moved to the UK when I was a baby, and we moved into like the countryside in the UK. So everyone there was white. My mum's Nigerian. We struggled with money. So we became not just the black family, the only black family. In a school of about 1,500 kids, I think I was the only black kid,

other than my siblings. We became the poor family in a middle-class area. And we understand the value of anything, not objectively, but in the context in which we see it. So on a menu, if it has three stakes, you will use the cheap steak and the expensive steak to figure out that the middle steak is probably right. And people make different decisions when you change context,

the things you see it within. So in my context, I was less than. I was inferior. I was full of shame. Nobody ever came to my house because it was smashed to pieces. We were the weird family. My mom was very, very, very strange. And I thought that success or money would validate me

and make me like my rich white friends. and like a lack of money was the reason why I couldn't fit in. So very, and then I struggle in school so badly that at 14 years old, I realized, I remember having the thought very clearly that I'm not going to get there by grades. And so I start these businesses at 14 years old. I start business at 14, 15 years old. And I realize at 15 years old that I can get my peers to come to my events or school trips. And I go, oh, my God, these people are going to be adults with me.

And actually, the most important skill in the world isn't intelligence, it's human psychology. And I can learn human psychology. So I used to steal the psychology books from the class, and I used to think, God, if I just learned human psychology, I learn about the biggest barriers that we all face, which aren't walls or buildings, they are other people. The difference between you being the greatest salesperson in the world or the greatest leader or the greatest philanthropist isn't a wall. It is people you need to persuade of your opinion.

And so, 15 years old, I realized that I'm not going to go to school anymore. I stopped going. that's why I get expelled. And I start building businesses. And the shame is, yeah, I was the black kid. I was the poor black kid. And at some point, I worked my way out of that shame. And I went from being dragged by the shame

to being very much in the driving seat, being intentional. I sold the fancy things that I had. I couldn't give a fuck about fancy things. And it became more intentional. So, yeah, we're all driven by that. Everyone I've interviewed that's become an anomaly has somewhat of an anomalous background, a chip on their shoulder.

And honestly, I interview people, when I'm interviewing them, I'm looking for people that have a chip on their shoulder. Barbara Cochran from Shark Tank said to me, of all of her investments she's done in Shark Tank, she goes, I know when the founder's going to be successful because they have early trauma, can be little-totrauma, not just Big T-T trauma, little T-trauma. And she goes, when those founders with little T-trauma call me and tell me that the business I've invested in is struggling, they do something remarkable that nobody else does. they call me with the solution attached. They don't just call me and say, the business is struggling. They say the business is struggling and here's what we're going to do about it. And I think that's what you get from that kind of childhood,

is you get a resilience and a perseverance and a paperwall mentality and a delusional sense of self-belief. Amazing. Thank you. Amazing. Good question. Thank you. Right here.

Check, check, check. First and foremost, can we make some noise for Stephen really quick? Make some noise. We can do better than that. Let's go. What a treat. Patrick, thank you so much for booking, Stephen. This has been the highlight.

I love you, Pat, but this has been the highlight for you. Thank you so much. Stephen, this is in regards to your media company. In order, you stated that you were signing people inside of the space. And in order to do that, you have to be truly, truly, truly interested in someone's potential more than their position. You have to look at them and be able to buy. low and not strike out because there's a plethora of us out there. Give me your top three things that you're looking for to pinpoint whether or not a show

is trending, that host is trending, or you know what, I want to invest in that person. Yeah, this is a good opportunity for me to answer that question and an adjacent one. Cool. In the first innings of my career, I didn't realize that the most important highest leverage thing that I do, whether when it's building a business or investing or signing creators now, is recruitment. I used to think that my outcomes when I was 18, 19 years old, would be determined by how hard I worked, how smart I was, how good my ideas were. And then it's somewhere along the way, probably at about 30 years old, I realized that the definition of the word company is group of people.

And actually, I think if we met in five years' time, I think your outcomes would sit really, really well on a graph, would correlate to how much hours you spend on a weekly basis, recruit. I probably spend, I don't know, 30 hours a week just on recruitment. If 60% of the company, if there are 200 odd people that work in just my media company, where we sign creators, will say that they filled out my culture test, which is a website we built called culturetest.com, and they'll say that they got a call maybe within a couple of hours. I mean, Sarah's here now. She filled out the culture test, got a call from me within,

got a text from me within like, you know, 10 minutes we were on the phone with each other, flew her out that weekend on Saturday. Saturday, she left her job and she's been with me now for a week. But it's the same with my whole team. I am head of recruitment in my company. This is what Steve Jobs knew. Steve Jobs said, people think that I've built the success of Apple because I'm brilliant because I have good ideas, but what I've actually done is I've gone through the excruciating process of finding truly exceptional people. And he said, when you find truly exceptional people, it propagates. A players only want to work with A players. I spend probably 30, 40 hours a week on recruitment, interviewing people,

building our systems to find world-class people. And here's a thought experiment for you. Because, again, I want to liberate you from thinking that hard work and great ideas that is the thing that is going to make you successful. If you managed to hire, again, thought experiment, didn't say it was realistic. If you managed to hire Elon Musk,

it's just that you did. What would your outcomes be in the next 10 years? Exactly. So from there, because every product idea you have, Every innovation, failure, podcast test, all of it is going to come from the brain of a person. All of it is downstream from the team. So why do we spend so long on the tactics and strategies when we know that actually the highest leverage thing any of us can do is find higher quality people? Like, it's possible.

It's within the laws of physics that you could hire me to come and build the podcast for you. And then think about the difference in your outcomes if you did that for your podcast business. I guarantee I'll get you to 10 million subscribers. in five years. So that has been one of the great unobvious strategies for me is being obsessed about recruitment more so than anyone else that I, any of the founders in my portfolio. The founders in my portfolio spend two hours a week, five hours a week on recruitment. I'll try and spend like 40 to 45 hours a week on recruitment. I'll spend nine months interviewing someone. I'll fly around the world following them until they take their job with me.

Arda, who I mentioned from Amazon, by the way. I called her straight away after she did the culture test, two months of interviewing her, she said no, which is annoying. A month later, I hit her back up. I started sending her these Shawshank Redemption Gifts because I knew she was trapped at Amazon and wanted to get out of it. And then I'm in Cape Town and she goes, let's have another conversation. And then I flew her to London, cleared my schedule and sat with her for many, many days on end. And eventually she took the job. Unbelievable. Think about the value that's going to add to my company over the next decade.

Because I put in two months to find a world-class person who's then built this world-class team. The game is to go further upstream. Now to answer your question about creators, so we culture test everybody. People think that company culture is these things you write on like a whiteboard at an offsite, ambition, be nice to people and all those things. Company culture, in my definition, is behavior, how you behave in a given circumstance. When you get a text message from a client on New Year's Eve and the client needs the login details for their account, but the person that has it is a way on their honeymoon, what do you do? So we ask anybody that wants to come and work at our company, 33 questions like this.

I told you the paper wall question earlier. And if they get above 80% alignment, they're hired into our business. About 2% of the population gets above 70%. So we have to, we've probably culture tested about 3,000, 400,000 people across all of the tests in the last year and a half. I think it's the most important thing that we do. and we do the same with our creators. So the ones we've signed, like Maggie Sellers,

who runs the biggest female business podcast in the world at the moment, we signed, we invested, we bought some of the IP. She was 81% on culture test or whatever it was, really, really hard on culture test. And that's the most important thing. Same with my founders in my portfolio. We culture test all of them. To check, they have the agency, the ambition, the hard work,

the paper wall mentality. They have a bias towards optimism. They lean in when the world changes. They push people. They have uncomfortable conversations when it's socially expedient to just be nice, that's what we test for. And if you were asking me what it takes to be a great creator,

it's just like obsession. Right. You have to not be doing it for the money because the money may not show up for years and years and years. That's a lagging indicator. You have to have a humility because all creators at some point fall. If you look back through the biggest creators in the world 10 years ago,

they're not the same ones today. And that's because they get romantic and start to believe that the reason they were successful, is something special about them. So if you want to survive, you have to be willing to reinvent. I actually just wrote an essay to my team a couple of days ago about Ryan Krosner, the US Shotput Olympian, who's won three gold medals in Shotput.

And in the story I tell of Ryan, in 2023, he decides, for the first time ever, he's going to completely rebuild his shop. So what you typically do in Shopputt is you start. at the back of the circle, you kind of do this spin, and you throw it. Ryan decided he was going to go right back to the beginning, throw out all the rule books, and come up with a completely different way to throw the shot put. The guy has won three gold medals for the United States.

He now, and he's 35 years old, starts from the side of the circle, and he figured out because he went back to first principles in physics, I think he was a data scientist, had an interest in physics, that he could beat his world record with this completely reinvented shot. And he did. He came out through the shot, starting in the middle of the circle, and won the gold medal yet again. Tiger Woods did the same. Tiger Woods, was it 19 years old, won the PGA tour, and then looked at his own swing on video and said, I think I need to rebuild my swing if I'm going to become the greatest in the world. He spent two years failing with this completely new swing, not winning anything. Everybody said, Tiger shouldn't have done this. Rebuilt his new swing, became, as many people would say, the greatest of all time. This idea of constant reinvesting. has to be at the heart of your business and personal philosophy, and it's not possible if you're romantic. So I wrote that letter to my team about Tiger and about Ryan,

because we're now, you know, we're going to be the most subscribed podcast in the world in 60 days. And what happens? What does history say happens when someone becomes successful? They get involved in this thing called loss aversion. Daniel Kahneman, the great psychologist who passed away last year, found that if you lost $10 on the floor, if you then found $10 on the fourth floor,

it doesn't make up for losing $10. You'd have to find $20 to make up for losing $10. Something within us doesn't like to lose things that we have. So we go into defense. In history, one of my favorite books is The Innovators' Dilemma. The case studies why successful people lose their success. And it's because in the book it says you do exactly what you're supposed to do. You start listening to your customers.

You give your customers exactly what they want. and your customers keep you trapped. You get trapped in what they call sustaining your success. But to win in the next S-curve, you have to be self-disruptive. And this is not something that comes naturally. So we look for great humility to answer the question. And great people that are highly, highly unromantic, that have these growth mindsets.

They're willing to be wrong and to change and be right today and wrong tomorrow. I think this is, you know, I want to, I think, it kind of links to what I was saying about paper walls, this idea of self-disruption, because also there will be a lot of you in this room that want to start a podcast or want to follow in the footsteps of someone that was successful. And actually, my advice would be,

you know, the reason why we were successful in podcasting was because we knew nothing about podcasting. I had no idea people didn't do trailers, and we would make, you know, we had no idea that every podcast wasn't making 100 clips. I had no idea that every podcast wasn't testing the title 400. times before they published. I had no preconception, so I was unencumbered by convention and status quo. And that's where innovation comes from. The innovator's dilemma shows, you know, that it looks at

digging excavators and microdisks, all these companies through history that become successful. And then it looks at the next innovation and who took part. And the book says the current successful person almost never takes part in the next innovation. And the reason for this can be seen in, you know, horse and carriage industry in the 1800s. If I was the CEO of a horse and carriage business, and Patrick was a team member of mine, and Patrick came to me and said, Stephen, I've got this idea. Cars. I'd go, Patrick, tell me about cars. Are they faster than the horses at the time? And this is always the case with innovation. It's always worse. Patrick would say, no. There's actually a law where you have to walk in front of a car with a red flag. They go five miles an hour.

Next question. Are our current customers asking for cars? No. They want faster horses. Are we set up from a supply chain perspective to make cars? No, no, no, no, no, no. We have stables. We're set up to make faster horses. I would tell them to get out my fucking office. And then my colleague comes in and says, boss, I've got a new idea. Patrick's was terrible. I've got an idea. What is it? Faster horses. Can we make faster horses? Yes. Do our customers want them? Yes. Are they better than the current horses that we have? Yes. Let's do the horses. people get killed because they do exactly what they're supposed to do. And so, you know, if I was starting in any industry now,

I would see your great advantage as being your naivety and not copying Stephen or Patrick, being completely free to reason up to a better solution and to let money be a lagging indicator, not the deciding factor. Okay, when I sell my business, I want the best tax and investment advice. I want to help my kids. and I want to give back to the community. Ooh, then it's the vacation of a lifetime.

I wonder if my head of office has a forever setting. An IG Private Wealth Advisor creates the clarity you need with plans that harmonize your business, your family, and your dreams. Get financial advice that puts you at the center. Find your advisor at IG Private Wealth.com. Maining! Maying! Part of the beast is the must-see adventure of the year. It's just you and me, boy.

One of the most extraordinary on-screen bond you'll ever see. I'll get you home. Brad Pitt, Art of the Beast. September 25th. Get tickets now. Beautiful answer. My goodness. Great question, great answer.

Thank you. I'm going to go right here. Go for it. I'll give short answers. My question is about kids and AI. I have five kids, and I'm puzzled. I can't figure it out. AI saved my life.

I cannot, like, six years ago, I would type a Facebook. post and ask my employee to prove read it for me now AI does it. I have five kids. My oldest is 18. My kids hate AI with a passion. Wow. They don't let me do anything. Recently I came up with the iPhone rules. I typed it up, went to cloud, hey, give me like the structure so they can sign it. And they're like, is it AI? So my kids think that AI makes you lazy, makes you less creative, that it's bad for everyone, and I'm constantly fighting this. They hate CHIPT, they hate Clod, and I can't figure it out why new generation is, and like, part of me likes it because I hate AI content as well. What's your take and what

data do you have on kids in the AI? So a friend of mine is Andrew Huberman. He's actually just been on the show last week again at my house. And I remember Andrew Huberman talking about this part of the brain called the anterior mid-singulate cortex. And I think Andrew had said to me that it was probably the most important discovery of the last century as it relates to neuroscience. It is a part of the brain in the sort of middle,

if I had your brain here and I opened it, kind of like at the top in the middle. And the remarkable thing about this part of your brain is it grows when you do things you actively resist and you don't want to do. So we've looked for a long time. Why are some people really, really good at, like, you know, David Goggins could go out and run 100 kilometers to the airport with bags on his back?

Well, actually, the science on this is remarkable. People that do hard things have a bigger anterior mid-singulate cortex. Older generations have big anterior mid-singulate cortex than their kids who have been swiping on social media and have much more comfortable lives. Athletes have the biggest anterior mid-singulate cortex. people that are lazy or who are slightly out of shape, have smaller anterior mid-singulate cortexes.

And all of this is to say that hardship today neurologically sets you up to be able to solve hard problems tomorrow. And in a world where our kids are getting very, or even some of us, are getting very used to having AI do the thinking for us, I would posit from first principles that the great advantage of the next decade is going to be to resist the temptation to defer your thinking to an AI.

Even to know the right question to ask a large language model requires a huge amount of context and understanding. Understanding the right question to ask might be the most important skill of the next 10 years, and that is a byproduct of your own deep understanding of a problem. So, one of the things that I'm doing now more than I've ever done in my entire life is writing.

Because I think it's growing certain parts of my brain regions that are going to make me better able to work with these tools. I write more memos on a weekly basis without a shadow of a doubt than anybody in this room. Remember a second ago, I said I just wrote an essay to my team. I probably said that three or four times in this conversation. I think when everybody goes right, and this goes to the polls rising at the same time point I made earlier, when everybody starts to defer their thinking to AI, I think the people that are going to build the best companies because they know the right questions to ask

and they understand the context are going to be those that don't. So I say all this to say, maybe your kids are right. Unbelievable. I think that's the right thing to finish off on, Stephen. FYI, you know what else I like about Stephen? Maybe let's come over here. Look at his taste in shoes. I don't know if you guys saw this or not.

I had no clue this guy had such great taste. Look at these shoes. Can you show the bottom of it? Look at these shoes the man's got. I'm going to be in a few guys. How many guys love Stephen Bartlett being here? Ten out of all. Make some noise.

Stephen Bartlett. Wow. Thank you for that. Unreal. Do you want to be the guy that gets all the pressure? Do you want to be the number two guy? You want to be a cruise control person. Loki.

No one knows what you're doing. You're just living your life. Who do you want to be? How big of a life do you want to build?