The FlightStory ‘sisters’ helping Steven Bartlett scale Diary of a CEO

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0:46I was a huge fan of podcasts. They'd like changed my life in so many ways. I was a media junkie. That's Georgie Holt, the CEO of Flight Story, the media company that is probably best known for this show. You're one of the three godfathers of AI, the most cited scientist on Google Scholar, but I also read that you're an introvert. It begs the question, why have you decided to step out of your introversion? The instantly recognisable voice of Stephen Bartlett, of course, the host of The Diary of a CEO. He is an entrepreneur and the owner of Flight Story, founded in 2021, which makes his show. Flight Story also now makes many other hit podcasts and indeed sees itself as a disruptive media company in the emerging creator economy.

1:31Today we'll hear the story of how Bartlett teamed up with Georgie Holt to turn Flight Story into a media powerhouse. And we'll also hear from another very important person. I'll let Georgie introduce her. Do it with someone, let me be really honest here, doing it with someone that you trust and love and honestly would trust your entire life with. That someone is the woman Georgie Holt affectionately calls CB, Christiana Brenton, the Chief Revenue Officer at Flight Story. People obviously look at us and think podcast company, but we don't. We very rarely even use that language internally. In our minds, we're building creator-led media brands, and today the long form happens to be called a podcast.

2:16I'm Dougal Shaw, and this is the Business Leader Podcast, where we look at the stories and strategies behind modern businesses. Today I've come to the Flight Story Studios in central London to meet together in person this powerful duo, CEO Georgie Holt and Chief Revenue Officer Christiana Brenton, who are also co-founders of Flight Story Studios, a division within the wider brand that is Flight Story Group, a distinction that we'll explore later. What I really want to find out in this conversation is this, what is the gap in the media market they spotted? What's the magic formula they found to scale Flight Story?

2:53What's it like to work with Stephen Bartlett? And what's the future of podcasting in an age where it seems everyone wants to start a podcast?

3:06This is my first time in this building here and I've had a very quick tour. It's quite an amazing place and I know it's being renovated right now. But what kind of stuff happens here? we make produce scale distribute and monetize world-class content and that world-class content primarily looks like and sounds like a podcast but i think what we do in the essence of what we think about every day is is bringing in a players crafting the best stories in the world that inspire human progress and sharing that impact globally as much as we can on every single channel and bringing in amazing creators to help us build and it's kind of like a video factory downstairs that you can see the different areas and there'll be cameras set up everywhere and it's like production more and more content exactly that and i think that speaks to also just the evolution of podcasting and i think that's like a bit of a common misconception of what we do here people also assume that we're a traditional podcast studio and they typically only do the production in-house and predominantly audio but of course that's changed in the last 12 months pretty you know pretty significantly with the rise of youtube consumption but because i work and the commercial team, we spend a lot of time educating the market and they still see Flight Story as, let's say, an independent studio without the realisation that we do, as Jay said, everything end-to-end in-house, which is what makes us unique.

4:19Typically a podcast creator would be signed to a traditional network for monetisation, for example, but everything is end-to-end in-house across signing, development, production, experimentation, distribution, marketing, and then monetisation across the various streams in which we monetise. it's a media company at its essence and its core it's I think we'd like to think that we are pioneering new media I think if you were trying to categorize what we're doing here and that is across every single channel every single touch point that we think that we can engage a community deepen a relationship mostly through contents now going into 2026 a lot more in person we really feel a huge responsibility having cultivated and grown such large digital audiences that we have a responsibility to move those people into real world experiences because these deep communities have been built around these phenomenal brands.

5:12And now we want to bring them together in the real world. We've got a huge responsibility around that. Just one thing on that on downstairs where it's being renovated. What's what's that going to look like in terms of the new podcast studios coming in? We are about to invest in digital screens. So we think that in order to scale the content at the rapid rate that we want to, and to produce more shows, to build more brands around inspirational creators. We actually need a space that's really, really flexible and leans into modern technology and allows us to press a button and we're in the diary of a CEO studio, press a button we're in the We Need to Talk studio, press a button we're on the bustling streets of New York for a campaign with a media sort of brand that we're kind of building into the commercial team.

5:58So I think it's that flexibility and agility and using technology as a tool in order to scale the stories that we make here every single day. I had a tour of the studios, which are spread across the building on several floors. While some have been gutted to make way for those new digital screens, I could also see the studio sets used for familiar podcasts like Begin Again with Davina McCall and We Need to Talk with Paul C. Brunson. An interesting thing about this interview is that obviously I'm interviewing both of you together. So I've got the CEO and the chief revenue officer. Does that say something about your leadership style that you're kind of collaborative, share the limelight?

6:36That's your approach? I think that's been quite unique that we are co-founders. So Georgie and I actually met about five years ago at Acast, another podcasting business that's fundamentally very different. But G held the role of managing director and myself in the commercial team. So we kind of have these really complementary skill sets that, you know, Georgie spent her whole life in editorial and publishing. I've spent my whole life working with creators in monetization and so hence the partnership was formed and I you know still remember the first day that we met in I think February 2020 it was a virtual call and it was just instant ideological connection of our love and passion for even on a virtual call you felt the the lightning bolt yes yeah and um that was kind of the daily laugh kind of this double act was formed and then we um really scaled ACAST UK through its IPO era and then they sent us over to the US together to kind of reset our US operations because it was a leading brand in the UK but Challenger in the US.

7:32So we've had this kind of duality of our leadership showing up together for many years now and it's complimentary but different swim lanes and I think that's how we've been able to deliver such I suppose phenomenal growth because you don't need two CEOs in a sense as well. You've got to have that kind of radical acceptance of where we can both have our superpowers and contribute to the business in very different ways but without the editorial and without the monetization you know we don't we don't get to where we are today um but yeah I would say we're all very aligned myself Georgie and Stephen around how we show up and the lanes that we contribute in and it all works together we have like a set meeting with each other once a week or something or is it less formal than that we never stop talking uh I think when I see people uh in my private life friends family they ask me sometimes ask me how my husband is first sometimes they ask me how CB is first it really honestly it kind of bounces between the two and Stephen sometimes jokes and he calls us the sisters I think that that definitely defines our relationship it it's about a sisterhood and a shared vision and belief that we can create something that can have well changing impact but also do it with someone and we're really honest here doing it with someone that you trust and love and honestly would trust your entire life with and we do every day because we make big decisions we we pivot we change we move extremely quickly here so that like deep trust has to be so fundamental in the relationship I don't think there's anything that CB doesn't know about me we can read each other um like a book so we actually can't interview people at the same time because we I'd be able to read her body signals and I know she's thinking right it is yeah it's such a superpower it's amazing and I really I really implore anyone um to try and find I think that's why that co-founder structure exists because you actually need to do this with other people and I think you know very successful companies are built on extremely strong co-founding relationships and there's a reason that exists is that as a human being doing it with someone else is a an unbelievable joy and experience but B, you fundamentally need somebody.

9:42You really do need someone to go through those trenches with, those difficult times to celebrate the moments with. If you're building on your own, I think that can be quite a lonely experience. So to do it with someone, but particularly to do it with CB, has been a transformational experience. And I think there's a real superpower in the trust piece because we are not conflict adverse and we often disagree, but we're able to disagree and commit and move on fast. yeah whereas i think if you don't have that trust in the depth of the relationship i think it'll be it's it's more difficult i think in executive-led decisions where we can hash it out um and certainly debate with steven that's a fun that's a fun other character in the mix and all three of us tag team you can kind of yes and honestly it's always different perspectives but then it's always better on the other side of that debate and then there's no resentment or conflict if one person's kind of you know pov you know we're not moving forward with in that moment and i just think gosh i really do reflect on ceos that have to do it solo and how much of an accelerant it's been to have the three of us with this deeply trusting relationship because of our ability to move through uncomfortable conversations fast i remember i once interviewed um two identical twins who are sisters that behind the double dutch drinks and they said similar to what you were saying on the same wavelength but also in one there's like an emotional connection if one was down the other would lift the other up and vice versa 100 it's so true and and i think that we there's been times where i think we've both looked at each other and we've gone i've got this today like you just you get into your deep work you do what you need to do get through this kind of negotiation or this deal or this moment and i've got it like i'll go and take on the sort of more public facing stuff that we need to go and do today and i know you need to go and focus but it's a profound experience and it's one that I think is transformative and I think particularly I don't know whether it's more unusual than not and I don't want to make this gender coded in any way but you don't see a lot of like female co-founders you see a lot of like stories of men who built businesses together there's a lot of you know great examples of you know the PayPal mafia and all of the businesses they went and built after co-founding those kind of those companies together but I don't know whether there's enough examples of like women co-founding businesses and I think as you've brilliantly articulated there that there are going to be times you disagree with each other you are going to have moments of conflict you are going to have times where you are completely opposing sides of a discussion and debate but it's the ability to be emotionally intelligent about what you're debating to disagree and commit to it as you said and to move on quickly because how much time is wasted when you aren't able to move on yeah And I think we've come to that realisation a lot this year is that when you don't move on fast, it's such a high cost to the business, to your speed, to your urgency and being able to let go and to be able to say, I believe you, you go and do it.

12:41I back you all the way, even though 10 minutes before you might have been holding a completely different view on the other side of the table and just how much time you save and how much more urgently you can move when you move on quickly. It just really speaks to an overarching cultural principle we have here, which is, you know, high humility, low ego. And it's the number one trait we look for. And I think that's the ability to be able to disagree and commit as ultimately comes to having humility. Also, in most areas, it's still a male dominated world, especially in investment. So maybe if the two women together can kind of double up a bit and be more powerful, maybe.

13:13Yeah, I mean, it's I've it's it's I don't think we tell the stories enough of co-founding relationships. and sometimes the complexity. I mean, I said, you know, we'd spend all of our waking hours together as much as, I mean, seven days a week sometimes. But I don't think that's unique. I think that's a lot of how these businesses get built and the unique qualities and characteristics of those relationships, because they are like a sisterhood, like a marriage, this commitment you make to each other to build something, not just for each other, but for what happens is almost your extended players, your extended, like these people start to come into your life, your team starts to grow you start to bring new voices and perspectives in and that changes dynamics in a relationship it's kind of maybe like having a family and and sort of seeing how that changes things for you but if the core of what you have is stable strong trusted committed intent on the same vision and goals I honestly think anything is possible from that point and just to take it back to Acast and obviously it was great that you two met there but what was the kind of what did you learn there about podcasting and what was the kind of business opportunity that you both spotted it was slightly different you I'll talk about it from the creator angle um a cast was and is a brilliant business they really spotted the opportunity in podcasting I think before so many other people did and what I loved about what a cast was saying um when they talked about podcasting they did put the creator at the heart of what they were saying to the market about podcasters and podcasting as an opportunity for audiences, but also for brands.

14:53I don't think it was necessarily calling them creators at the time. They were uniquely calling them podcasters, but they really wanted podcasters to be able to build a business out of their craft. And that's something that really resonated with me because I was a huge fan of podcasts. They'd like changed my life in so many ways. I was a media junkie. I've been doing it for such a long time now. I'm absolutely addicted and obsessed. But what I loved about podcasting so much when it started to become a bit more into the cultural zeitgeist was it gave long form storytelling and long form journalism room to breathe again.

15:27And I'd worked in lots of media organisations where that was sort of being contracted and constricted over time. You know, articles were getting shorter, 140 characters or less, you know, how quickly and how fast can we tell this story? Maybe without the nuance, the multiple perspectives that we actually needed to do it justice and then podcasting started to emerge and this unbelievable long form format started to take hold of people's imaginations and people's kind of media diet and I thought thank god we haven't lost ourselves entirely to like short form content there is still this ability to tell stories and to tell deeply nuanced stories and I think ACAST really understood that and they understood the power of a podcaster and that relationship they had with the audience and that is what drew me to them over time that business has changed and it's become a little bit more geared towards ad tech and and how it can sort of do a lot of really important work for advertisers but that is what drew me in and I think it was sort of similar to you yes I mean I'm so fortunate and grateful for my time at ACAST I was with them for five years in three markets all over the world Australia UK the US you know and I really I really do credit them for accelerating my journey to Georgie and then Stephen.

16:38From a commercial perspective, I always felt that we were limiting the real potential because their model is predominantly advertising funded. And yes, that's a core part of the creator economy, but it's only one part of the monetization potential when you don't look at them like podcasters with an ad sales agreement, but you think about them from a world of creating IP and recognizing the disruptive potential of looking at these creators not as as again podcast hosts to but just you know to kind of capitalize on the the advertising potential but okay if we build out a brand world what else could we do with these creators and I always felt really limited commercially in that regard and again I think that's why I was so compelled when I met Stephen because he was one of the first creators I had ever met that recognized you know everything that we had kind of discussed the disruptive potential of building entire brand worlds.

17:33I mean, today, advertising income, for example, is only 50 % of our revenue streams. And I don't think you'll find those kind of comps anywhere else at those traditional networks. You know, we're fully diversified across anywhere between eight to nine active income streams across brand partnerships, but then speaking in live, platform monetization. We have a publishing partnership with Flight Books. We do product and e-commerce. We do live events and experiences, newsletters, communities. and you see we're kind of a much more diverse flywheel of potential and I always felt really limited and also too far removed from the creator because those models have representation deals.

18:11They're not making the content. And so even that, you're one step removed, which I think clients really often do feel the friction in the bigger creative opportunities. And so being closer to the source and recognising that we're scaling IP, not just making podcasts and wanting to monetise through ads has been what is so exciting about ultimately Flat Story and what we're building here. So I can see why there was a meeting of minds with you two at ACAS, but you mentioned Stephen Bartlett there. How does he come into the picture and how do you all begin to work together? Wow, the 3rd of October, 2023, my friend.

18:43A date that will be in my mind forever. Forever. So Georgie and I had just resigned from our executive roles in New York. in, we had left in June, 2023 to actually launch, we had launched a different business altogether, still in the podcasting industry. It was telling media, a podcast media agency. So much more on the planning and buying side of the equation. And we had just launched that business. You know, we bootstrapped it, invested our own capital, won our early clients gaining momentum. And then on the 3rd of October, Stephen Bartlett posted on LinkedIn, which is something that he does.

19:18He's obsessed with recruitment and he uses his phenomenal inbuilt distribution across social to do so and at that time he was saying that he had ambitions of building a network he was calling at the time after the phenomenal success of Dariova CEO he had high conviction that him and his team had built the world's most valuable blueprint as it went to scaling podcast IP and kind of a call to action for anyone to contact him that may be interested in being part of that or part of the founding team and I have a message from Georgie 3rd of October I think it was just after midnight and it said, did you see Stephen Bartlett's post?

19:54And I replied and said, yes, we should draft him something. And we drafted him an email. But funnily enough, Alex Homozi, who's often on the podcast, often talks about this with or without you energy. Because we were so high conviction and happy and passionate with what we had already launched, you know, we spent maybe 20 minutes drafting that email. Just, you know, a brief overview of who we are, our experience in the global podcasting industry, and you know could we potentially find a way to partner together and then had we included a calendar link for you know him to have a meeting with us to remove the friction for a busy founder and then imagine our surprise the next day christiana brenton stroke stephen bartlett up in my in my diary invite and then we had our first meeting with him which i'll let you reflect on that half an hour interaction i was actually talking to somebody about this today because they you know do you realize those transformational moments when they're happening to you or is that something you only recognize after the fact um and I think when we put that calendar link and I was looking back thinking who like what were we doing like we were just like flexing like yeah if you want to meet us you can meet us it's like no big deal um and I don't know whether we really had an agenda for that meeting I think what's he represented to me and I think to CB as well like he was sort of the pinnacle of what was possible in podcasts he was a radical he was doing things differently he wasn't following the same blueprint as everybody else he was saying things that I think even some of the businesses and industries that I was connected to and working in sort of seemed slightly controversial and maybe not with a status quo and I found that so interesting and and so compelling so I don't think we even had an agenda we were like well you know we want to scale our company he wants to scale his maybe there's a meeting of mutual benefit in the middle somewhere and even when that meeting went in I don't think we thought that he would join the call we were like well it you know it will be part of his team and there'll be some sort of diligence process to check that we're real people and there isn't a couple of bots on the end of the of the line and we opened up the screen and there he was on the other side and he was like I've been reading about you two um it's very interesting who you are to me and what I'm about to go and do can I share what this is and obviously we were called as cucumbers on the screen but I think underneath we were like banging knees with each other and being like oh shit okay this really is Stephen Barlett on the other end of the line here we probably need to take this seriously and think about what it might mean but as CB said and you rightly pointed out already there was like a meeting of minds and I think the Stephen that we had seen or enjoyed from a content point of view and maybe the Stephen we'd seen talk about podcasting you know from reach from impact from subscriber growth to channel growth and sort of thinking about how we're scaling the diary of a CEO the way he humanized what his intentions were and was so clear about the human impact that he passionately believed that the driver's CEO was having and could see having because he was getting hundreds thousands of emails DMs sort of from people saying I listened to your episode I made a life-changing decision I changed how I ate how I slept my purpose in life and he could see that impact and he in a really unselfish way because he could have just continued and gone I'm going to keep this blueprint to myself and I'm going to scale this business to be the biggest podcast in the world because I know I can do it he said I meet transformational people every single week on this show whose voice I think can go on and change the world and I think I want to share that blueprint with people to help them go and do that it's an experiment I don't know how we're going to do that but I need the right people to go and figure out whether this experiment is something we should go and do and he said this now infamous line that we used in some of our early pitch decks because he said he was haunted by the potential.

23:51He was haunted by the fact that he thought he had built something that he wanted to share and wanted to see whether he could scale other creators that he was deeply passionate about, cared about. I mean, even then we weren't really using the words creator economy. We were talking about podcast growth, podcast media, podcast technology. And I thought, oh, shit. Oh, shit. We're building something over here, and I think we might want to go and build something over there. So that was sort of a bit of a moment of like realisation for me on that call. I came off and I thought. Thinking about the call.

24:24Yeah, this is going to be big. And that's an important part of the story because, yes, we recognise the commercial opportunity. But similar when I first met Georgie was the ideological alignment of why our intrinsic motivations. And it's because we all fundamentally believe that if people consume more long-form content of this nature, it'll have a net positive psychological impact on the world. and it does if you think about kind of this dopamine addiction of scrolling in short form. Yes, we use other means as an end to the long form, but I do remember hearing Stephen speak about the why and he followed up an email and I also remember those words because he said, you know, life feels serendipitous at the time that I can't even explain to you right now because when I heard you and Georgie speak from your heart, it was as if you were speaking to mine.

25:13and it's insane how fast it moved from there you know keep in mind we had a whole nother business that we had launched within 48 hours we were in shoreditch meeting the entire team 24 hours later sent us a formal offer in another 48 hours we were pitching to our first high-profile creator so that speaks to the urgency at which we well now we certainly move i met him once as a journalist in a professional capacity and he struck me as, you know, in the 20 minutes that we were together, very dynamic, very good at thinking on his feet. Is he quite a kind of hands-on person in the business or what's the relationship like on an ongoing basis?

25:51Yeah, he's obsessed. He's obsessed with the impact that we can have. There are areas of the business that, let me put it this way, when we talk about the future of this company and the ambitions and the goals that we have, There are a few areas that we want him to spend his maximum amount of very finite time on. So he's, you know, entrepreneur, founder, investor, media owner, creator. I mean, he is so dynamic in that way and he lives in many, many worlds. So we almost had asks of him this year. We really sort of wanted to make sure that we focused our time and his time in the right ways. of course number one the diary of a ceo continue on that unbelievable trajectory that they're on and continue to obsess about how we build the biggest podcast in the world and take that blueprint and understand how we can scale that for other creators the second one is building tools and technology he is an unbelievable builder of tools and technology and i'm sure we'll spend some time getting to this but some of the tools and technology that he has built because he's built through the pain of being a creator and the frustration of human effort being wasted and said I think we can use data here and I think we can use a tool and we can kill the guesswork and we can get faster and better than ever before and there's lots of tools that we're now using that I'd love to talk about after this but the the third one was recruitment and culture to continue to be our greatest recruit recruiter collector of people and to hold the culture bar and our recruitment bar the highest it can ever be held because that ultimately is how we will win is to find these brilliant people and these aid players so they're the areas that we focused on him they're also the areas that he he loves to be in before we get back to growing the business and looking at data and all these things i want to talk about just one thing to clarify what's the difference between flight story and flight story studio because you two are obviously co-founders of flight story studio but what how what's the relationship between the two okay flat story is the brand identity and there's two pillars as it stands today flight story studio which is the media arm where we scale our creator-led brands and then flight story fund which is the investment vehicle um so we do a lot of investment deals in in unique ways where rather than having to invest capital necessarily we do blender deals where we're you know we're trading marketing and distribution for preferential um equity terms and early phase businesses so there's a fund and a studio stroke media component to the flight story um as an umbrella brand and do you sort of compare the different revenues each makes or is it are you just reading the big masters at revenue pot the revenues are different in a sense so these are realized today right revenues that are on our pnl on the balance sheet and these are future investment bets they're going to pay off over a longer term time horizon you know based on the trigger event liquidity event of those businesses like stand store like whoop like perfect head some of those early ventures and whilst we don't see the revenue recognition on the PayNow today, they're the future investments.

28:57On your LinkedIn, you say, there's a sentence that sort of caught my eye. Diary of a CEO is not just a show, it's a proof of concept for scaling high value global IP from principle led creators. Two things there, you mentioned already the proof of concept, but that's basically saying what Stephen's done growing his brand and his podcast that can be done for others and we can make a bigger business around it. Principal-led creators, what does that mean? It goes back to building a brand world and building a deep brand world that humans can feel like they belong to and be part of. And one of the greatest opportunities, and I think the biggest potential we have in a creator economy or creator-led media or this fundamental belief that we have that the next billion dollar media companies will be from single human IP I had someone else say it the creators are um single media empires trapped inside a human being and I thought that was a really really good way of saying I think it was yeah I think it was it was really good I think it was Gary um that's good Gary Vaynerchuk that said it it was it was brilliant I was like I know exactly what that means because I know when I meet one and I know what can happen when you build one and start to scale a creator out in that way but they have to have a really clear set of principles and a unique perspective on the world and often they think through first principles so they spend a lot of time figuring out maybe what their first principles are around entertainment around business around content creation and they they think from a place of first principles which means that their worldview is quite often built in frameworks whether they articulate them as simply as like I have a framework for x y and z and if you follow this you'll get ABC they see the world through a lens of first principles and it's quite similar to how founders think and founders build because they'll have a set of first principles a vision a belief an idea that they can make and can evidence and impact through the content they've created almost always at a human level not just I've reached x million people in two weeks on these 10 posts and this piece of long form it's like I have evidence of human impact I have dms emails I meet people in the street and they come up to me and they they say things about my work and they are appreciative and grateful and I and I am almost overwhelmed by that moment because I I almost don't know what to do with it now um and that sort of idea that those principles are actually transferring into an audience and those they that audience are feeling that they can understand what those are and get value from those.

31:35I think that's what we mean by principle led creators, that you have a set of first principles through which you see the world and a first principle belief about how you think you can change it. Then when you're scaling, is there a principle or sometimes it does feel sometimes with creators that the only principle is I want to grow my audience and therefore I'm going to choose the guests to speak to because they've got a big audience and we're going to grow together. Is there a danger that that can kind of take over a little bit in the mentality? soon it's definitely the wrong answer to that question if someone asked me about what they were doing i just want to make it as big as i can as fast as i can that's never the answer i'll speak to to some of the tools that we touched on earlier um the guest choice has a transformative impact on the show and yes the answer can be let's go and find someone with a huge global audience and see if we can move that audience over to this channel and fingers crossed they stay and the content is sticky enough and they come back for the next episode but that's not actually the answer you want to get the highest potential guest you can for your show for your audience and think about that venn diagram of what am i uniquely interested in talking about what can i sit and talk about for five hours with somebody and stay engaged and full in full attention when you think about someone like Stephen or any of our creators, Davina or Paul, like these are extraordinarily busy people.

32:58They have a lot of other things to be doing apart from recording a podcast for eight hours. I mean, truly. So they have to be, this has to be a conversation that they are deeply interested in. That also is a conversation that they have data-driven insights to prove that this is going to have an impact on the audience, that there is enough signals in all of the data tooling that we use to demonstrate that this conversation is relevant timely it's going to have a positive impact on the audience which will then have a positive impact on our metrics wait so is that before you've chosen to do the interview you check the data first and then the final one is um what's the final one that they're a gifted communicator thank you i'll say that a lot you know you can have professors and god she's here honestly you see that's the co-founding relationship and action i'm like this is just what was that last yeah particularly with the driver ceo um i proudly still watched every episode i've published but uh there's a lot of subject matter experts that come in yeah professors doctors and they can have really interesting subject matter but if they can't if they're not gifted communicators in the framework model that jee mentioned as well that is like fundamental to cut through to the audience in a really simplified and accessible way which is something that i really marvel at steven and all of our creators that they are intentionally bringing the audience in.

34:20And even though they may know what something means, they can explain what that means if it's a complex theory. So accessibility is really important as well because it's in service of the audience. So Stephen might be interested. The data might be saying yes. But ultimately, if that guest can't communicate their subject matter in an accessible way, then it's not going to perform. So is that not a tool as such? Is that just human beings in your team doing pre-research? It's not a tool. It used to be human beings doing days and days of research into all of those parts of the Venn diagram to then present it to our host to say, you know, is this someone you want to speak to?

34:56That was high human effort. And Stephen believed and was absolutely correct that we could build a tool that could do it for us. And now we have a tool called Guest Radar that is able to constantly review everything that's happening on multiple digital channels from YouTube to Spotify to short form channels to understand high potential people in subject matter expertise. and if a guest comes up as a opportunity to speak to we can use this tool to understand what is that potential of that guest to drive a great conversation but also to have an impact on some of the metrics that we measure so that tool is now something we use every single time to book a guest but how does it know how engaging the person is is it based on their interactions with their audience or is it actually listening to their voice and multiple different signals so and it's modeled through all of their previous exposure on predominantly YouTube but also social platforms, the most read and played moments data, the AVD, the engagement rates and then it's about understanding those signals.

36:01And I think where a lot of kind of previous podcasters have maybe missed a beat is that, you know, celebrities don't necessarily perform. In fact, the celebrity episodes on all of our content are not the highest performing and it's about understanding the engagement rates of exactly what audiences are searching for. And the thing is that YouTube can also show you as well in terms of the content gaps as well. There's a real kind of sweet spot that lives within Guest Raider of understanding the content gaps, which means people are searching for those topics and there's not enough content. But then also, you know, the sweet spot of it's going to be a big enough volume of search.

36:39And Stephen, yeah, to his credit, and the tech team here have built a platform that enables us to, he says this quite a lot on stage, kill the guesswork that's fundamentally the the principle and the infrastructure within our business and I think that's often misunderstood in market they assume the studio is oh it's the same production team implementing the same methodologies to build the new shows and I mean you don't become the second biggest podcast in the world second to only Joe Rogan without the technology and infrastructure I mean Stephen now is set to overtake him in a matter of 12 months Joe Rogan launched in 2009 versus DOAC only five years now, six years on YouTube.

37:15And once you see the A-B testing and technology infrastructure behind the show, I mean, that's when we met him. We were mind blown because you speak about our earlier context at Acast. There was no real kind of A-B, you know, A-B testing, analytical approach to signings. It was still, I'd say, the more traditional legacy media approach of, you know, editors kind of making human bias-led decisions on that kind of culture and taste as opposed to really having this default to what is the data and analytics telling us around what's going to perform. So what other tools do you have that you can use?

37:49Well, we've now, to take the guest radar discussion one step further, we're building the same tool for creators. So we, first is using vibes and guesswork to kind of go, well, that creator looks interesting. Our team seem to like their content. They seem cool. And of the moment, we've now translated the guest radar technology into crater radar. So we are able to not guess anymore about who we think the highest potential creators are in the world, which to me is so exciting because it just democratizes access to these opportunities that there's maybe someone somewhere in the world right now who's producing great content but has just not had the opportunity to get in front of the right agent or the right investor.

38:31And we're going to go and find them using this tool. So suddenly this entire game has changed and we can use unbelievable data and technology to help us predict who we think the next great creator entrepreneur is going to be using this technology. So that's not to find a guest, that's to find a potential new host or is it both? Correct, yeah. Creator to build media, sort of a media company around, turn their kind of content into a company, to put their infrastructure around their influence, but also potentially for product, product and e-commerce. You know, when creators start to convert really engaged audiences, particularly if they're principle-led and have great frameworks, because their opportunity to build product in e-commerce starts to get bigger and more interesting.

39:10Their ability to drive community events, to drive live events, that's a huge opportunity as we see it. So we're not just looking for media, we're looking for signals that demonstrate community and creator radar is a tool that is, I think it's MVP, but the last iteration of that MVP, I think even, I mean, it takes a lot to shake Steven when he's just like, okay, this is interesting. he I think sent a note to the team he was like we've got something we have something significant here and I think this is the next iteration of how the crater economy is going to grow and we've built it in-house which is just amazing I mean we're so passionate about this subject matter because we fundamentally believe whoever wins the crater acquisition game will win the crater economy game because it's now how do you find the next wave of emerging craters and then how do you apply our infrastructure to scale and that's the big bet you know we talk about our investment decisions it's it's it's finding those creators faster and understanding signals better than anyone else in the world which is what we're building um which is i mean incredibly exciting because ultimately we already have the infrastructure in fact we have the proven proven blueprint in not only dire of a ceo but our other media brands that are now you know scaling on average 10 times faster than dire of a ceo in the same time frame so that kind of hard part has already been sold for now it's about the discovery engine we speak about asking Stephen to help us with recruit recruitment yeah in our mind recruitment is our teams but also our creators and help us recruit the next wave that's gonna we're gonna sign to sign to story you obviously don't have any fears that the podcasting could reach a kind of saturation point I mean in the past it used to be everyone wants to be famous or everyone will be famous for 15 minutes now it's Everyone wants to interview the famous person.

40:54Like anyone can do it. Could we get to a point where there's too many? It's a great question. I actually think the opposite is true. I think we're at an inflection point now. And I think 2025, 2026 will be the last years of media as like, I knew it. And maybe we knew it. Because I think we'll get into a world of AI generated content and human generated content. and we will see efficiency and speed and effectiveness coming out of AR generated content and I think there'll be a place that we will enjoy it and have a strong experience with it and also a very negative experience with it too and we will be pulled because we are ultimately human beings towards humans in media and that will feel like an elevated experience and it will feel more important than ever and it's sort of like saying is media saturated I mean it's not just long form it's everywhere all the time all at once which is why we kind of keep coming back to yes it's about creators and yes it's about scaling media and this sort of tension that we'll start to find between this AI generated content and human generated content and we'll sort of need to decide as a species where we're going to spend more of our time and what it means to us in terms of what we find important and interesting and entertaining and there will be a need for one and a deep need for the other but the human generated content it's like can these humans then bring these people together beyond driving a media outcome beyond scaling a channel like do I want to go and spend time with other people who love begin again with Davina McCool what does that brand mean to me what are the principles of that brand do I want to share that space with other people who love the brand that I do and feel connected and build community through media and media brands and I think that's what that unique opportunity is and what we're really kind of looking to find but I think we'll hold this generational tension that we'll spend the next 10-20 years trying to figure out is like what is the need of speed and efficiency what is the need for like human generated media and the formats will evolve you know it's I know people obviously look at us and think podcast company but we don't we very rarely even use that language internally and I think it's because the market likes to kind of bucket you and certainly from like a monetization perspective that's the easier classification but in our minds we're building creator-led media brands and today the long form happens to be called a podcast and we're under no misconception that in six months it's probably going to look and feel like something else and you know potentially short form will come back or new formats that we haven't even imagined yet because if you had have asked you know Stephen and the team five years ago you're going to be distributing three hour episodes on YouTube they would have thought that was insane and so I think one thing that we can commit to is that the format will change but the commitment to creator-led media won't and I think that just speaks to our our ability to experiment and A-B test those considerations faster than I believe anyone else in the world because we're going to understand what is going to be the preferred format faster and then pivot and so much so we actually have a team called flight x which sole purpose is to disrupt disrupt and kill what we're doing their mission every day is to try and kill us um are they given free reign to actually do that truly sometimes i have to like watch my back when i leave the building just in case they take it too far um but that that that is the that is the the manifesto and that is their their day-to-day is to try and kill what we are doing every single day by testing radically new ideas new formats new tools technologies we have a couple of new formats launching out of flight x this year which again have been built to try and kill what we're doing here because as soon as you get romantic businesses die and we have two phrases in this work that we say in this world that we say to each other all the time kill the guesswork and kill the romance the moment you get romantic about how something was or should be is actually the early signals of decline and i've worked for a really long time and I am a romantic, I hope I'm a romantic person and there's things that I love and feel deeply passionate about.

44:56But I also understand that when I start to feel those feelings, that is a signal that I'm holding on to something that perhaps may longest not serve us in the future of this company. So flight X, every single day, try and kill what we're doing. I think I'm guilty of that. That phrase is going to haunt me now. We all are. I think about a lot with even podcasting. Gosh, six months ago, there was still a debate on LinkedIn about audio versus video podcasts. And if you're still debating, you know, it's going to be very hard to catch up. Simply because from a first principles perspective, your greatest barrier to success now is discoverability.

45:30And your chances of improving that discoverability is filming it. Not just to have a video asset, but to widen your distribution ecosystem. Our shows today live on YouTube, Spotify, 15 airlines worldwide, Samsung TV, billboards every short form platform in the community so it's just a means of distribution um it's just so there's a lot of debate around the romanticism of audio in the podcast first video um and I still love audio podcasts I I sit here and in fact I was having a conversation this morning about listening to a podcast that had the most unbelievable soundscaping that it stopped me in my tracks and like pulled my attention and so deeply into that conversation because I use of audio and sound so it's all still available to us it doesn't mean that we're never going to think about audio again I think the audio experience from listening to music to listening to podcasts is profound human experience so neglecting that will cost us something in the future so we'll yeah we'll we'll keep and in fact we were talking about how we invest even deeper into the audio experience that we must never forget that there are people who still just love to listen and how do we make sure that we are as deeply passionate about that audience as we are about the audience that watches on YouTube and not losing some of those tensions that we really like to hold in this company.

46:49It's like, this is true, and that is also true as well. Well, two things can be true at the same time. That is the beauty of scaling media rounds. There you go. There was the live debate. There you go. Audio or video podcast. It could become like vinyl, the audio podcast, or headphones with the wires or something like that. Of course. We should assume anything could happen, you know, in terms of who would have thought that. I feel like we're back to this analog era now. We went to that place in LA, didn't we? That unbelievable studio that's run by Colin and Samir. Those absolutely brilliant creators.

47:22They have a maker studio, a founder studio in Venice. They were kind enough to show us around. Brilliant creators, brilliant thought leaders. And they have an analog room in the studio that you can't use technology in. but it's a creative room so you go in and create and make and and use that room to just build analog creativity and I just loved it and there were people in there with scissors and fabrics and tape and like it was all done by hat and I thought that is the exact tension that brilliant creators can hold is that um yes you can be building brilliant digital media but you can also be obsessed about the analog experience which goes back to that yes you You can build huge digital communities, but you actually need to service those communities in real life as well.

48:11That to me is the most interesting inflection point that we're in. We talk about two things can be true at the same time. Are we leveraging technology and AI to help us scale our digital content faster? Yes. Are we also tripling down on our bets that in-person human connections will ultimately scale the currency of our entire company? Also, yes. You know, Stephen talks about this a lot. when the whole world goes left the real opportunity is right because what happens when we go too far I'm sure you've even seen it on your own feeds it's just like the kind of habituation filter now everything kind of sounds the same and even emails that you receive from people are so automated that people are going to crave in-person experiences and then that speaks to this our big focus to the future is community and how are we actually leveraging our ability to scale these digital audiences but then translate that into community in-person connections which is what we're absolutely obsessed about at the moment because we're at this really interesting intersection between two things being true at the same time so events maybe running events something absolutely that's a huge that's an existing pillar in our business we already run um run events bringing these community of like-minded individuals together they're often kind of curious um we you know typically for steven's audience you know these time poor growth seekers but they're craving more information and that in-person connection to help them you know either build their businesses or have healthier relationships friends and family and i mean stephen just wrapped in his international speaking in life tour you know sold out stadiums of seeing that community come together and then we're thinking about we've already experimented a little bit by doing doak live in cinemas as well bringing the community together for watch parties and then you're just going to see more iterations of that of bringing them together because it's absolutely what the audience wants which is interesting we did um a huge research sprint a lot of call research with doak audiences globally um and obviously you know deeply need to understand your customer deeply you need to understand their emotional and functional needs and every single conversation was when we brought people together for the focus groups often they were they'd never met each other before so they were meeting on screen for the first time they just wanted to talk to each other they wanted to like know more about each other's lives and one of the most profound things I heard someone say is like, I would just like to be able to wear a symbol or like a badge or something that just told other people that I really like the diary of a CEO.

50:35And if we were getting a coffee together, you were wearing it too. And we could sit and talk about the episode together and which was your favorite part. And I was like, that is unbelievable. And I thought, well, of course, because we do that all the time for other entertainment industries like football and bands and music. You wear shirts with the band name on, you wear a football shirt with the, you know the colors of your favorite team and it immediately identifies you that oh we both like the same team we both like the same music we'd probably have like a lot in common if we spent time talking to each other and maybe going to an experience together that was about the thing we loved and I thought yeah that's exactly what we do as human beings we signal all the time that this is who I am this is what I love it's one of the reasons I fell in love with print and and why print was such a a signifier for people is that if I saw you on the tube reading a particular type of magazine, a rugby or football magazine, I'm like, that's a guy that likes sport.

51:31That's interesting. I like sport too. Maybe I'd strike up a conversation with you about the latest results or the latest game. But it was a signifier. And I think sometimes when you're locked in a digital space on your phone, those signifiers kind of tend to disappear about who you are, become more homogenized. So people really want to be able to signal and say, I love this. Do you love it too? Maybe we should do something about that. And that's the opportunity in the backdrop of legacy media. it's very difficult to cultivate that same level of connection and community with like a publisher brand like a faceless institutional brand versus an individual a human being that you're connecting with and I think that's why we're seeing the community cultivate at faster rates than I've ever seen in my previous tenure at any other media company and it's because that relationship you can cultivate with a faceless kind of publisher brand versus a human is just so much more diverse and in depth.

52:20A last sort of a general question and this is maybe like a bit of a fear that's been on my mind. So as a journalist for like the last 10-15 years, journalists are in some ways the original content makers and we had to deal with social media to get our stories out there. But a lot of the time we seem to be like, I think of it as being slaves to the algorithm or someone else's algorithm and you're constantly second guessing the algorithm. Does it like this? Does it want it shorter? Does it want a different headline? I see myself sometimes compromising what I'm doing to please the algorithm. And I've seen it in other people thinking, why have you done that you don't you're doing that because you think the algorithms algorithm is going to like it and i suppose there's a bit of a sadness in that but also you have to hedge your bets because there's all these different platforms whether it's youtube instagram facebook who are doing it differently even linkedin now and their algorithm has changed a lot i don't know is that something you think about have you had to make sure you're on lots of different platforms because you can't rely on one do you actually spend time thinking about the algorithm or do you not overthink it we're obsessed first of all we're obsessed with the algorithm yeah so you are slaves we're not we're not we're not I don't think slaves is the right word I think it's an obsession with using it as a signal and an exceptionally important data point I remember having this debate with Stephen early on I've been spent my life surrounded by journalists and I love the craft of journalism, its unique ability to tell complex stories at scale.

53:44I think it's one of the crafts we need to protect as AI-generated content particularly starts to really infringe on that space. And he said, I understand. I understand that tension, but wouldn't it be a shame? Wouldn't it be a shame if you had a profoundly important story to tell and you didn't pay attention to the algorithm and you didn't look for the signals it was trying to give you to help you tell that story to help you tell as many people as you possibly can about that story wouldn't it be a shame and I thought yeah it really really would but I will also say more to what you said is you can do both it doesn't have to mean that because you look at what the algorithm is saying it's actually a signal and you can test and experiment and and understand what is working on each platform but I think that's why it's interesting where things like Substack have started to take off that yes you can have a conversation with an audience on different platforms and use the different signals or data points that particular platform is looking for and using to kind of drive the attention to your story but there are other ways and there's still ways that you can write freely express exactly as you want to express in the way that you intended and I think it's interesting to start to see people moving to newsletters moving to sub stack moving to in real life experiences where there's just nothing quite like watching a human being on stage acting talking expressing themselves like that these things can all happen at the same time and they aren't compromises there isn't like well if I do that I can't do that anymore you can do all of it and it's making sure that you know that you can two things can be true at the same time I remember this exact debate I remember the exact moment this this topic came up and it was so compelling because if you really fundamentally believe in the power of your long form and the power of your long form article book which you absolutely should it's all just packaging and there's almost like a you know we talk about the romanticism it's almost just like a radical acceptance that we have to package it in a certain way to make sure we're giving the long form its full potential yeah because the performance variations it's actually shocking between naming conventions of introducing someone as a professor there's a doctor there's a wellness expert all of that is kind of tested what is tested for every single one of our guests the performance variations can be anywhere between a 100 to 700 percent click-through rate variation like it's insane and then that is the difference between reaching 100 ,000 people or millions just in the packaging and understanding how to package it but as long as you continue to believe in the power of the long form which we do is when I think those kind of journalistic principles come in then let's do everything we can and play the you know the tricks of the algorithmic trade to get people to consume the long form.

56:27So you have to have something at core that is your offer that you're proud of and then the rest is more promoting and trying to bring people to it. Yeah, first principles, principle-led thinkers, principle-led creators, if those principles are super clear, it's a packaging game and that's fun. Why not play it because we want more people and we believe in the power of the long form. You've been listening to me, Dougal Shaw, speaking to Georgie Holt and Christiana Brenton of Flight story in glorious long form audio for the business leader podcast. Maybe that makes us a bit romantic. Please do rate and subscribe to us wherever you get your podcasts.

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