STEVEN BARTLETT INTERVIEW AND AUDIENCE Q&A Source: Limitless AI lifelog Date: September 1, 2026 Timezone: America/Toronto (EDT) Extracted range: 6:26:26 PM–7:59 PM EDT Source lifelog range: 6:26:26 PM–8:00:26 PM EDT Lifelog ID: et9rqthBK3WF8Sf3ca2Q Boundary note: This starts with the host's introduction/video immediately before Steven Bartlett comes onstage, includes the complete interview and audience Q&A, and ends with the host's closing remarks at 7:59 PM. The unrelated event announcements beginning at 8:00 PM were excluded. ================================================================================ ## The host introduces Steven Bartlett and plays a video highlighting his entrepreneurial journey and mindset - Unknown (9/1/26 6:26 PM): Steve's got straps. He's got straps. He's we're about to get into to sit down with our friend, Tier Tom. If you want to work your way to the back and Yang, I don't know how long I'm going to be going with him. I may go 20 minutes, I may go 30 minutes, I may go 40 minutes, but I really want to open it up for you guys to be able to ask questions. Because no one in the world is growing their podcast faster than this man and everybody wants to find out how the hell he's doing it. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:26 PM): They call him the science of podcasting. Like he has figured out the science of podcasting, even though he doesn't even call his podcast a podcast. He calls it a show. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:27 PM): Tell me, do we have a video for him before we bring it up? I think we do. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:27 PM): If we do, please - Unknown (9/1/26 6:27 PM): and by the way, he just had a, he flew out from UK. Like this is not he doesn't live in the states. He's all the way on the other side. He agreed to come down here. It's a long flight with great before his time. Please turn your attention to the video. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:27 PM): Diary of a CEO. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:27 PM): Diary of a CEO. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:27 PM): Diary of a CEO. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:27 PM): Diary of a CEO. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:27 PM): You ever seen Steven Bartlett? You're like, what is this guy? Where's he from? - Unknown (9/1/26 6:27 PM): Steven Bartlett. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:27 PM): Steven Bartlett. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:27 PM): Steven Bartlett, everybody. Check him out. All the way from UK. He's the CEO. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:27 PM): So, top podcaster in the world, 16 20 million subscribers. What did he do? What's he just a podcaster? - Unknown (9/1/26 6:27 PM): A single track-high was a healthy dose of delusions. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:27 PM): And that delusion is sometimes also reflected to self-belief. I didn't know what the water was going to look like when I started podcast business. I didn't know how hard it was. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:27 PM): The key to success in business and in content creation in my eyes is you have to increase your experimentation rate and our failure competition. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:27 PM): How do we create strategies to arrive at the correct answer fast? - Unknown (9/1/26 6:28 PM): I didn't think there was anything between where I am now and where I wanted to be. It was just whether I wanted it or not. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:28 PM): The fastest runner on the earth. I couldn't see a thing. It's my absolute obsession. I will be successful. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:28 PM): I just never felt like I had a permanent seat. ## Steven Bartlett discusses his early career running a major media company and applying audience-growth principles to podcasting - Unknown (9/1/26 6:28 PM): Please welcome to the stage, Stephen Bartlett. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:28 PM): Even more than that. Steven - Unknown (9/1/26 6:28 PM): Thank you for having me. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:28 PM): Great success. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:28 PM): 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 6 months. 11 million it's going to slow up, 17 million, 19.6 million. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:29 PM): On track to be the number one podcast in the world, Stephen Bartlett, Diary of a CEO show, but also founder of social business man. There's a lot of things people don't know and his company Stephen.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, of course. 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 a CEO? - Unknown (9/1/26 6:29 PM): First of all, thank you for giving me your time today. I really appreciate that. 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 founded, which was a public company at that time, I was learning how to grow how to audiences on the internet, and I was writing to 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 tanker in the US as well. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:30 PM): But it's important context because people will know me as podcaster, but for 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. Um and so really what I did is I ported over the skills that I learned 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 - Unknown (9/1/26 6:30 PM): 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. That's, so let me get this 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, and you're turned the knob a little bit this way, it worked, too much or it didn't work. That's literally - Unknown (9/1/26 6:31 PM): So you're on the back end studying every algorithm, everything that's going on. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:31 PM): Because we earned those channels, they were across Facebook back in the days, Snapchat, Twitter, um so they were our channels, we produced all the content on those channels. And are you are you on those videos or no? No, it's faces. We have faces with that, yeah. And it shifted to being created essentially, which is theory to go change, but the principles of scaling an audience or storytelling or understanding algorithms, they they remain largely the same. And the thing with me, just to kind of say, 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 at the rate of not that it's changing at now, principles should hold really irrespective of what business you're in or what you're trying to do. And so, yeah, everything to 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 what is the first So when you're doing this, you're seeing all the faceless 100 million channel, 100 million subscribers that you guys are managing. What made you say, I think I can go from faceless to being the face. And and a brain like yours, you could have gone a lot of different directions and made a lot of money because that brain is an analytical brain that can go create products, go all this other stuff, why choose to start a show? Why what was the thinking behind that? ## Steven Bartlett explains his transition to podcasting to achieve deep impact and escape algorithm dependency - Unknown (9/1/26 6:32 PM): So, um, 27 years old, I stepped down as CEO before the company's about to outlist 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 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, you know, I've 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 IPOs, because they they didn't the biotech industry didn't understand the skill set of content and storytelling. This was around the time that um game stock had collapsed, and the holes for finance industry got really obsessed with retail investors. I've done I've worked in so many different industries. Um, podcasting in particular was based on a set of principles. At the time, back then in 2000 in the 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 that through my 20s, I could see the trend year over year, which is that myself and all my competitors were losing roughly 50% of our organic reach a year. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:33 PM): So, essentially, if like 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 sucked eventually. That's what we call it. We call it getting sucked. It's the slow loss of your audience because they have to put more ads into the feed and they have to - Unknown (9/1/26 6:34 PM): give punch to the things. So it's a decentralized platform that offers death to 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 jux the position. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:34 PM): Whose diary and kind of earth you're most likely to see inside? Who has the most secret? How has the most information, but also in terms of um, again, this is another principle in terms of supply and demand, there was a a lack of supply of people in high places being vulnerable and honest on the open. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:34 PM): Um, so I thought that was an interesting jux to position. And then off we went and it's pivoted and experimented its way to what it is today. Did you did you think when you started like, because you have that previous background, were you were you 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. No. ## Steven Bartlett explains the importance of rapid experimentation and embracing failure to find the right business answers - Unknown (9/1/26 6:34 PM): Maybe share the warning that you went through at the beginning. Yeah, and this is maybe like the first really critical principle, which is if you listen to futurist like Ray Kurzweil, who who's 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. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:35 PM): I if you're 10 years old now, by the age of 60, you'll experience a gears change roughly 10 days. If you're 40 now, by the age of 60, you'll experience a gears change in roughly 90 days. This means that the correct answer to anything you're contending with in your business, how to do marketing? How do you contact? I mean, we're seeing it right our eyes, the correct answer is going to change faster than ever before. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:35 PM): So, how do we operate in such a world where the correct answer, even in your personal relationships, you just think forward, the correct answer is going to change. So, how do I find the correct answer? This is the first principal question before my competitors. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:35 PM): What are my options? I think I want to purchase Cole's wonderful books. Problem with Cole's books, if they're not written on principles and tactics and strategies, um, is that they take about a year to publish. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:36 PM): Like these books, they take quite a long time to write and then they get to be published. 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, you know, three, four, five, six months in the world that we're heading towards. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:36 PM): So, instead of giving me, instead of me giving you a fish, the fishing rod, which will allow you to find the correct answer yourselves, faster than any of your competitors, is quite simply your rate of experimentation and failure. Quite simply. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:36 PM): And this is not something that I've come up with. If you read through Jeff Bezos's shareholder letters, going back to 2015, he is clear, he says, Amazon will win if we are the best place on earth to fail. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:36 PM): If you look at how booking.com the hotel's other platform is built, they used to argue over the right decision. And then one day they made a a bet that they would build an experimentation platform to kill the guess what. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:36 PM): Actually that phrase killed the guess work 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 organization's rate of trying stuff. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:37 PM): And at Amazon, you probably don't know about the fire film 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 10 will pay for the crazy. And when I think about the growth of my show, it's the one in 10 that have learned to be the introduction of partnership to a guest, you know. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:37 PM): Where he said, you know what, two months ago we had a million subscribers in 30 days. This month we're probably about six or 700,000 subscribers, which is about six or seven 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. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:37 PM): It is because if you look to our rate of trying things, but 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. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:38 PM): 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 happens? And if it fails, great. If it succeeds, great. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:38 PM): The key thing here if you're going to implement this new 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. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:38 PM): If you incentivize the outcome, 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. I'm purely focused on increasing the rate of experimentation. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:39 PM): And listen, I can I can tell you more case studies through history of the great companies in the world how they all arrived at the same conclusion. That you don't actually have to be that smart in life. I'm actually not smart. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:39 PM): If you kid, it's fell from school, went to university for one day, not good at maths, not good at English. So I think in principles that will get me to the right answers faster than my competitors. And this idea of failure experimentation is central to that. Stephen, that's fascinating. Would you mind to give us a case study? You know, give us a case study of something you guys tested that failed and you like what happened? ## Steven Bartlett discusses the "1% principle" and how compounding small improvements leads to exponential growth - Unknown (9/1/26 6:39 PM): I mean every day there's there's probably 10 15 things a day. But um 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. It's also another slack channel called 1%. I read a book that changed my life when I was 18 years old by Jeff Olson. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:39 PM): Jeff Olson, um it was called the slight edge. And what 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. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:40 PM): So people don't do them. I brush 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. Um, but 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. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:40 PM): And your money, your finances, they they all follow this perfectly um 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. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:41 PM): 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 kids are going to explain, you know, that bad breath stinks or something like that. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:41 PM): 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'll sit in a dental chair as the dentist is pulling out your molars. When did that happen? - Unknown (9/1/26 6:41 PM): It happened today with a decision that was easy to do or easy not to do by crushing your teeth. Every part of your life, your skin, your hair, your relationships, your podcast is is currently on this curve that is invisible in the near term, then fast. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:42 PM): And the direct series are fine examples 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. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:42 PM): And the crazy thing is when you start experimenting - Unknown (9/1/26 6:42 PM): For the guy at the CEO's set because we found out that if it goes above a thousand parts per million, it's like having one or two plates of beer. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:42 PM): 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. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:42 PM): And Jemima and and the team share that in the Slack channel, Jemima gets this huge round of applause. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:42 PM): Spotify Or when Israel Alasani comes on the show, they re we research the music to play for the guests that will relax them so that we can have this type of conversation we want. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:42 PM): And Israel Lassani walks in and says, man, Nixie Hudson's double up. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:42 PM): This takes me right back to my childhood. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:42 PM): My team are always experiencing that progress principle, we call it. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:43 PM): They are always stacking these tiny wings. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:43 PM): They are having a and and to go to this point, like, that's why we think there's no experiment too small. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:43 PM): And we stay out, again, as the business of of thinking, you know, what what's what experiment is worthy? - Unknown (9/1/26 6:43 PM): They are all worthy. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:43 PM): Some of the smallest changes we've made to the show has had the biggest impact. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:43 PM): I'll give you another another sort of idea on this. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:43 PM): I interviewed sir David Browsford, who is known for turning around the British cycling team. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:43 PM): He's the first chapter in James Clear's Atomic Habits. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:43 PM): He went into the British cycling team when they were the worst in the world. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:43 PM): They were depressed. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:43 PM): They were being mocked by the press. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:43 PM): And what he did is he banned them from thinking about the podium, and he got them utterly obsessed with 1% gains. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:43 PM): This is how the whole James Claire's book, Atomic Habits came to be. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:43 PM): It's the first chapter. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:43 PM): That's that's my friend, sir David Brailsford. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:43 PM): He obsessed them on tiny, tiny things that their competitors would overlook. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:44 PM): How big are the bottles? - Unknown (9/1/26 6:44 PM): Can we get 10% more water in the bottles? - Unknown (9/1/26 6:44 PM): How soft are the pillows in the hotel? - Unknown (9/1/26 6:44 PM): Now, you know, we all kind of understand this idea of marginal gains. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:44 PM): Some of them end up not being marginal. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:44 PM): 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. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:44 PM): But the interesting thing he said to me was when I first came into that British cycling team, they were leaving at the office at 5PM. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:44 PM): Because when we started stacking up these tiny, tiny wins, when we started getting interested in things that were so unbelievably petty, and he said people stopped stopped leaving at five and started leaving at 1AM in the morning. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:44 PM): He said we felt like we were going somewhere. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:44 PM): That is the progress principle. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:44 PM): If you wanna have 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. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:44 PM): And that is that's the secret. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:44 PM): It's so funny. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:44 PM): Like, I can go on any stage in the world and tell them the secrets to why we'll probably hit 50,000,000 subscribers in two years. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:45 PM): That's like the that's what the graph says. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:45 PM): It's these things that people won't do. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:45 PM): Because you almost have to have to have a religious belief to be that obsessed with changing the scent in the studio. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:45 PM): We're measuring the air pressure, the air conditioning, or doing 350 AB tests with Facebook ads for every single person we interviewed. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:45 PM): The captain came on my show, doing AB tests his name 50 times to see how people want to introduce him. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:45 PM): That that's the game. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:45 PM): You know? - Unknown (9/1/26 6:45 PM): How do people get who you think you are? - Unknown (9/1/26 6:45 PM): Electrificatable? - Unknown (9/1/26 6:45 PM): Yes. ## Steven Bartlett explains how he built a duplicatable system and software to scale other creators' podcasts - Unknown (9/1/26 6:45 PM): So meaning, let's just say you have a show. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:45 PM): I think you were on the apprentice of UK if our numbers not attracting some of the shark tank top of the model. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:45 PM): So if if somebody ABC came to you, CBS came to you and they said, Steven, we want to do a test. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:45 PM): We want you to take five people that are decent communicators. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:45 PM): Yeah. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:45 PM): And they come and work for you. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:45 PM): And we want to see how quickly you can take the YouTube channel to 10,000,000,000. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:45 PM): If we do, we're going to give - Unknown (9/1/26 6:45 PM): you 100,000,000 but just making this up. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:45 PM): Right? - Unknown (9/1/26 6:46 PM): Do you think you're that duplicatable that you can take anybody and cause them to go from zero to 10,000,000 subs? - Unknown (9/1/26 6:46 PM): We've kind of proven this. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:46 PM): So we signed someone called Paul Brunson, and his show is growing faster than nine of us at the same stage. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:46 PM): And that's that was my bet. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:46 PM): My we started a company called FlexRay. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:46 PM): We now have 150 people full time in the company. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:46 PM): And the bet was can we take other creators, give them our blueprint, and would it would it work? - Unknown (9/1/26 6:46 PM): And I said that to say that it's not me as an interviewer that is resulting in the success of the show. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:46 PM): It is you're seeing the tip of iceberg there, and there's this whole system built underneath. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:46 PM): Even with 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. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:46 PM): It looks at every guest that's ever appeared on any show in podcasting's history. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:46 PM): It's plugged into the back end of my channel, and it will tell me that you should get Robert Pate to come on here and perform 3.1 x. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:46 PM): So the the approach that I take to problem solving is I try and remove romance from it as much as I possibly can. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:46 PM): I don't think that I'm a special thing, and I try and build a system that will kill the guesswork. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:47 PM): So I think we've proven that we could - Unknown (9/1/26 6:47 PM): do that multiple times. ## Steven Bartlett discusses his 50-year vision, the concept of long-termism, and how extended timeframes change behavior - Unknown (9/1/26 6:47 PM): So what's more likely to happen? - Unknown (9/1/26 6:47 PM): Is it more likely that you stop diarrhea with CO in the next ten years or more likely that you develop an agent, like an immediate company where you have 50 people to build to do this, where you don't have 50,000,000 subscribers or 100,000,000 subscribers. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:47 PM): You've got a couple of billion subscribers on all your channels combined. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:47 PM): What's more likely to happen? - Unknown (9/1/26 6:47 PM): I will continue to do the direct sales for the next fifty years. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:47 PM): I've this is I'm really obsessed with this idea of long termism. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:47 PM): And we will scale our continue to scale our media company five three, which now has, you know, probably about 30 or 40 creative signed to it. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:47 PM): Yeah. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:47 PM): And we we own the hosting platform. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:47 PM): The biggest players in the world used to host their shows. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:47 PM): Alex and Rosie, Cody Sanchez, Simon Sinek, they all host their shows on the flight cards, which is the hosting platform we built, which gives me some of the tools that I've talked about here. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:48 PM): But, again, yeah. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:48 PM): So So what's the vision what's the vision of long? - Unknown (9/1/26 6:48 PM): You just said - Unknown (9/1/26 6:48 PM): fifty years. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:48 PM): So what there's gotta be a vision that because you you you got the childlike smile on your face right now. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:48 PM): So what do you think you're excited about - Unknown (9/1/26 6:48 PM): the future? - Unknown (9/1/26 6:48 PM): Yeah. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:48 PM): So I I I put this childlike smile on my face just because in this season of my life, I've I've started thinking a lot about this idea of long termism. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:48 PM): It is somewhat inspired by people like Elon Musk who continually took a long term approach to solving a problem. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:48 PM): And and the crazy thing is when you time frames in your life determine behavior let me give you an example. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:48 PM): My son is 39 years old. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:48 PM): I just called him for a FaceTime a couple of weeks ago. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:48 PM): I said I shouldn't say his name. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:48 PM): John. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:48 PM): I said, happy birthday. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:48 PM): And one of in the conversation, he said to me he goes, Steven, he's single right now. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:48 PM): He said, Steven, I will not be dating this time next year. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:48 PM): Right? - Unknown (9/1/26 6:48 PM): What he's done there without knowing it is he shifted his goal from finding the right partner to find the best person I can within a year. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:48 PM): 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. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:49 PM): Another thought experiment about how time arises to turn a behavior. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:49 PM): If I give you sixty seconds and unlimited bricks to build the highest tower that you could, what you would do, logically, is you get the bricks, you you turn them, stack them vertically, and go up as fast as you can in the sixty seconds. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:49 PM): Right? - Unknown (9/1/26 6:49 PM): And then if I blow, the tower falls down. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:49 PM): If I gave you unlimited bricks for one year, your behavior changes. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:49 PM): You start stacking them horizontally. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:49 PM): You build a really, really, really great foundation, and - Unknown (9/1/26 6:49 PM): then you go up. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:49 PM): And you'll build something that is built to last. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:49 PM): In that example, you see how Elon has built all of his businesses like SpaceX and Tesla, you know, reinventing a brand new battery, building out the charging network across The United States, he could have just used someone else. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:49 PM): When you think in long term when you have this thing called long termism, you make different decisions that create more ## Steven Bartlett discusses building infrastructure for creators and why distribution is the ultimate moat in the creator economy - Unknown (9/1/26 6:50 PM): company, but actually an even bigger moat. So the reason why we've got our own hosting platform and we've done a lot of 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 to what creators do. I want to build the most biggest media company in this industry. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:50 PM): 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 is that going to be just shows? Like you think in movies or you think in shows, or you think like, you know, episode, episodic type of thing you put on Netflix? Is that what you're thinking? - Unknown (9/1/26 6:50 PM): The medium, I'm less, unless, I'm not romantic about the medium. I've 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 infrastructure, they don't have the data infrastructure, they don't have the um the sort of back-office infrastructure. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:51 PM): And it's so clear to me what's about to happen in the in the creator economy. You're actually all creators now. You'll 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. ## Steven Bartlett explains why AI matchmaking makes follower counts irrelevant and why creators must prioritize audience sovereignty - Unknown (9/1/26 6:51 PM): I I do want to say to you you guys, because I I 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 and AI, they're learning about the context of the video that you've posted, - Unknown (9/1/26 6:51 PM): and then they're using that context to target it better to whoever wants to listen, 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. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:51 PM): Think about the incentives. Mark Zuckerberg has cool key earnings. He still report on how many ads have been sold. What why 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 AI to match make content. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:52 PM): This means, and the most important thing it has a business owner who has an audience on the internet, is sovereignty. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:52 PM): 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. Um, but do you own that relationship? - Unknown (9/1/26 6:52 PM): It's the most important thing. We used to think of social media as the as the bottom of the funnel, like I'll collect Facebook likes and Instagram followers. Um, 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. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:52 PM): 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 Financial Times and many other reports, and there's this sudden supply shock, unlimited infinite AI stock, that means that every unit of content and its view potential is going to fall. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:53 PM): So, you know, again, if I were starting a business today or a creator business today, I'd be doubling down and going sovereignty and any type of content that is irreplaceably human. ## Steven Bartlett discusses the value of "irreplaceably human" content and why lived experience is the ultimate defense against AI - Unknown (9/1/26 6:53 PM): What does that mean? Like, give me an example. Irreplaceably human. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:53 PM): Irreplaceably human. You're replaced by a human. Irreplaceably human. I'll I'll give you an example. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:53 PM): So, um, just a high-level idea here. Are we still going to watch the Formula One if they remove the humans from the cars? - Unknown (9/1/26 6:53 PM): My answer would be no. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:53 PM): Because there's something in watching Lewis Hamilton come down the back scratch against Verstappen. There's the emotion, the psychological resilience. You look at that, and as a human, you can relate to that feeling of competition, of loss. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:54 PM): You wouldn't have that if you removed the human. Um, 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. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:54 PM): I think you're now going to be able to get that information from an AI. What what what will you still want from a human? You will want that layer of lived experience, of relatability, which AI can never give you. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:54 PM): 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. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:54 PM): And so we've built an in-house team that produces these human documentaries now. I actually think it's going to be bigger than my podcast. Um, early signals suggest that. And that was funny cuz Jimmy, Mr. Beast, um, who who's a friend of mine, he released his first vlog 7 days ago. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:55 PM): And I thought to myself, cool, this it did 20 million views. I thought this is the bat signal. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:55 PM): Um, the more human, the better in your newsletter, in your in your podcast, whatever it is. If there's not a a layer of human of lived experience, you should assume the value of the thing is going to decay. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:55 PM): And I mean, you are a prime example of this, you have a story of overcoming, of coming coming here and building an incredible business. I don't think as we look forward, 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. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:55 PM): I think that human layer is really the bet of the next sort of decade or two. So that's what I'm doubling down on. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:56 PM): That's fascinating. That makes some noise because that's good for sport. He's seen he's been human. And plus the human is half AI. ## Steven Bartlett discusses the positive and negative impacts of AI on podcasting and production costs - Unknown (9/1/26 6:56 PM): So what what do you what do you think uh What do you think AI is going to do to the space of podcasting and creating shows negatively and positively? - Unknown (9/1/26 6:56 PM): Um, so okay, let's start first of all. The the cost of production is just going to continue to fall. So that's like no longer going to be the mode. For people like the impact, one of the modes used to be that we can afford the nine cameras and the production team and all that stuff. One of our early tests recently, we did this we built this thing called Agent Editor. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:56 PM): if you think it could be a human editors, and also about 4 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 and me and Patrick will still have as a note 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 be five interviews. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:56 PM): So that's still a bit of a note. Um, where it will change podcasting for the worst is if you're in the business of just delivering information, I think you're days are numbered. I I you know, and one of the principles we have in our company is about being highly unromantic. Like, highly highly unromantic. I'm 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. ## Steven Bartlett on the importance of human connection and in-person experiences in a digital world - Unknown (9/1/26 6:57 PM): Um and you have to 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 um on the down side? 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 maybe maybe you could have gone on the internet and found out Patrick's principles or principles of building business. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:57 PM): I think there's something else which is fundamentally Maslow and and you're not going to roll out of which is human connection. You know, if you if you starve the 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 of creating IRL experiences like this? ## Steven Bartlett explains why creators must prioritize audience sovereignty over follower counts due to aggressive algorithms - Unknown (9/1/26 6:58 PM): 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 and views between like say Patrick's best performing episode and his worst performing episode, and the gap is getting bigger. The variance between this and all that is the AI being more of an aggressive sorting hat. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:58 PM): TikTok is a prime example. The reason TikTok works so well is it's 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, 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. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:58 PM): It's going to be the big thing everybody regress on teaching more seriously because they were hooked on these three views that these algorithms were giving us. But if I look at some of the biggest podcasts in the world, they're down. Down 60%, down 70%, down 80%. And they all wish that they'd can can sort of 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 at the moment in followers alone. ## Steven Bartlett discusses using physical mail and tactile experiences as a sovereign channel to connect with audiences - Unknown (9/1/26 6:59 PM): So what's what's your method of extracting that content? Like when you look at your flywheel, how are you extracting your subscribers off of YouTube or Spotify to a different place? - Unknown (9/1/26 6:59 PM): There's lots of different ways. I think you have to you have to have an off, you have to have a a transaction you have to have a vent. you have to have a a newsletter. Um and one of the things, you know, I probably shouldn't say this in front of these many people because it is in a secret of that. Guess it could be fined. - Unknown (9/1/26 6:59 PM): Um is I might going to do it. Is I'm really interested now in physical posts from a creative perspective. So the reason why like for 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 beehiiv is because you can't get zapped there as easily. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:00 PM): And that they are 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 are 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 we've been way through an experiment out where I ask my audience, would you pay to receive a a package, physical package in the post from me? - Unknown (9/1/26 7:00 PM): Well, well, that's becoming again, this is irreplaceably human. It is getting better again on the death. 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 inverter, because you through history what you see is polls rising at the same time, when uh fast food became a big thing and ultra processed food became a big thing, everybody got obsessed about organic food. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:00 PM): When digital music got awesome, 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. Silent retreats, no phone retreats, sewing clubs. Things like this are going to get really popular. Until we those principles I go sovereignty, check. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:01 PM): I go, um, generations are increasingly wanting the physical, check. Is it going to survive? You're always going to need the address. So post. And a lot of D2C brands, some of the most exciting D2C brands in the world are seeing some of their best returns coming from Facebook ad sale. But in my portfolio, I have about 100 investments, a lot of them are D2C brands. Um, they're seeing some of their great greatest returns coming from posts, sending postcards from the founder to their customers with a discount code. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:01 PM): So at the moment, I'm midway through building a platform to allow creators to send post design and send posts to their audience. Yeah. ## Steven Bartlett and the host discuss how the metrics and data that matter for creators have evolved - Unknown (9/1/26 7:01 PM): Data. When we when we think about the evolution of what data matter 10 years ago versus today, oh my God, you know, they will make a video over 12 minutes. That's why your views should drops and dollars and Jo Rogan is doing a 3 and 1/2 hour podcast, gets, you know, 20 million views. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:02 PM): So what data used to matter 10 years ago that it doesn't matter today? And today, you want to say the top 5 most important data, I measure when I review show what are they? What I do podcast or just generally? Just general answer. ## Steven Bartlett explains why creators should focus on value per minute and view pessimism as an indicator of novelty - Unknown (9/1/26 7:02 PM): Um I would say the the most important signal I would be looking for, if I was starting something new, whether it is a business or a podcast is like value per minute. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:02 PM): I and I say this because, you know, when I started the podcast, I remember a guy called Alex sitting me down in 2017, 2017, roughly 2000, yeah, roughly 2000 roughly 2018, and explaining to me with perfect math that a podcast like mine could never possibly make money. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:02 PM): Um I ignored him. I remember 10 years earlier, Gordon sitting me down in London at Google campus and showing me these Facebook pages that I started to build in my business called Social Chain, a chain of social media pages. He he proved to me mathematically that it could never make money. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:03 PM): I ignored both Alex and Gordon. And the reason I've ignored both Alex and Gordon is because money is a lagging indicator of value. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:03 PM): 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 order these moments is like If you guys catch what he said, can you please repeat that? - Unknown (9/1/26 7:03 PM): Because because I remember I remember walking into I've never heard this 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 and they were concerned that they would have a Facebook page, their content would go viral, and they couldn't control it. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:03 PM): And with every good that 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 ## Steven Bartlett discusses the value of honest feedback from friends and building products that friends love - Unknown (9/1/26 7:04 PM): That's what it indicated. The other is just when I started the Darva CEO, my friend Oliver, one of my best friends, he would tell me if something was shit, and my friend Hash told me it was good. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:04 PM): And then when I stopped doing it for a month, Oliver came to me in the office. He works with me at the time. He said, when are you going to do that podcast again? I was use, I was listening to it on my commute. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:04 PM): And these 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 they'll be all people like your friends out there. ## Steven Bartlett discusses the success of translating his podcast into other languages despite initial failures and financial skepticism - Unknown (9/1/26 7:04 PM): And that's what we've always done. Even with translations on the Dar of CEO. So very many people were listen this month in a language that's not English and they'll listen for longer than they did in in English, which is remarkable. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:04 PM): 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. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:04 PM): Because I knew that at some point the underlying technology would get good enough and that it would unlock 90% of Pan her if you didn't speak English. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:05 PM): Um, my CFO, my finance team told me we wouldn't make any money. We didn'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. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:05 PM): But I 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 other languages, it's in the seven figures. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:05 PM): And this in this experiment has is now the fastest growing thing we've did in the history of our show. ## Steven Bartlett introduces the concept of "paper walls" and how Zara's founder challenged traditional fashion industry timelines - Unknown (9/1/26 7:05 PM): There's another principle that I think we should keep in mind because it reminded me of the battles that I've had through the last 15 years with with different people. It's this idea called paper walls. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:05 PM): And this is another slack channel in our company. It's called pushing on paper walls. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:05 PM): 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. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:06 PM): If you think about Amancio Ortega, who was the founder of Zara, he was a railway worker's son. He had never been in the fashion industry before. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:06 PM): And when he came to the fashion industry, I think it was in Spain, he said, why does it take 9 months to make these beautiful Italian shoes or why does it take 9 months to make clothes like this? - Unknown (9/1/26 7:06 PM): And people said, well, we make them in China, we design them in January, we send the order off to China, it takes 9 months for it to be shipped across the world and that's just the way it's always been done. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:06 PM): And Amancio Ortega said, why? Why is it done that way? - Unknown (9/1/26 7:06 PM): And they said, well, this is just the way it's always been done. You have to kind of be a servant in the fashion industry. You have to guess in January what people will want in September. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:06 PM): He said, why? And they said, that's the way it's always been done. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:06 PM): He was a bit of a disruptive founder, so he said, well, why can't I just put the factories here in Spain? They said, it'll be too expensive. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:07 PM): He said, why can't I just train my shop floor staff to watch every single day what people are actually buying and buying 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? - Unknown (9/1/26 7:07 PM): They said, it's impossible. Amancio Ortega is a prime example from history of someone who just pushed on walls and figured out that they were actually preference and tradition. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:07 PM): 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 Amancio Ortega's worth 180 billion, he did exactly that. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:07 PM): He built factories in Spain, way more expensive, but guess what happens when you build them in Spain? - Unknown (9/1/26 7:07 PM): You can build you can ship clothes faster, which means that people are more likely to wear them because they're currently in fashion. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:07 PM): Smaller lines, you train your shop floor staff to sketch what people are wearing that day and get it made within 10 days. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:07 PM): It built one of the biggest fashion businesses in the world. Amancio's worth 170 billion. ## Steven Bartlett shares historical examples of Roger Bannister and the invention of wheeled suitcases to illustrate breaking through artificial constraints - Unknown (9/1/26 7:07 PM): Another example of paper wall pushing comes from running. A guy called Roger Bannister in 1970, um, part-time runner, everybody said you can't break the four-minute mile. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:08 PM): Roger Bannister, a very, very stopping guy said, why? Scientist said your lungs will explode. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:08 PM): He said, why? Roger Bannister trained himself. No one in history had ever broke the four-minute mile. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:08 PM): Roger Bannister trained himself in April in 1978, I believe it was. He ran the world's first, he broke the four-minute mile for the first time. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:08 PM): This isn't the story. The story is that within days, 11 other people had broken it. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:08 PM): What does that say about the constraints and the limitations that every single person? Another example, Bernard Farrow, up until I think it was like the 1970s-ish, no suitcase on planet Earth had wheels on it. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:08 PM): 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. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:08 PM): And this guy called Bernard Farrow was in an airport, he saw a trolley was with some wheels on it and said, why can't put some trolleys on this suitcase? - Unknown (9/1/26 7:09 PM): Back then remember, bellboys and train stations, people were blowing their backs out. There was a whole industry designed to protect this paper wall. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:09 PM): People would carry your suitcase for you all the way back. He took this idea to a shop, they said absolutely not. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:09 PM): Eventually he just waited one final door to let himself sell suitcases on, which he'd literally just take it off his wardrobe at home to women. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:09 PM): They agreed. They marketed it to women and within days, there's a queue around the block of men buying load of cases. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:09 PM): And now 99.9% of all suitcases have these wheels on them. ## Steven Bartlett explains how the "paper wall" mindset drives team efficiency and introduces an animator named Tom - Unknown (9/1/26 7:09 PM): 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. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:09 PM): I round the numbers for my team and show 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. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:10 PM): You'll learn over those five years 170% faster. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:10 PM): You'll do things almost 200% faster. Um, and I'll give you one more example because it's very relevant to me as a creator. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:10 PM): We have this guy called Tom, we'll call him Tom. He's been working with me for four years across multiple companies. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:10 PM): He's out in the Philippines, he's the world's best animator. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:10 PM): Tom takes - Unknown (9/1/26 7:10 PM): so once since how long will it take to set nine days and then because we were we had this paid world idea in front of mind I said Tom what will it take to do it in two. Do you know what Tom said to me been working with me for four years. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:10 PM): He said Eden, - Unknown (9/1/26 7:10 PM): I need a new laptop. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:10 PM): He's working on an old laptop. He said I'm spending because five or six of the days I mean just rendering the stuff because if you bought me a new Mac Mac MacBook for $2,000, I can do your animation in two days. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:10 PM): This would have worked for me for four fucking years. ## Steven Bartlett explains how the "paper wall" mindset is used in hiring and team culture to challenge constraints - Unknown (9/1/26 7:11 PM): You know remarkable thing about paper walls. People themselves don't know their spread tracks and side paper walls. You are currently track 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 by product of going back to something that is preference and tradition and pushing on it to check its room. Asking why. So one of the questions we ask when we interview people is a paper wall question. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:11 PM): 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? - Unknown (9/1/26 7:11 PM): Scale back the event. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:11 PM): 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. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:11 PM): And this is what we find. This is what he learned to for Tesla. Everybody said you can't make a fast rechargeable battery. He said why. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:12 PM): And they said well they cost $600 on the on the 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 reduced that to a battery that was 20% of the cost. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:12 PM): You have to be a paper push and teams that are teams that have that culture of not accepting the constraints, more profitable, land faster, more innovative and everything in between. So we drill that into our team and every day on our slack channel called paper walls someone is posting in even the smallest paper wall. Even the smallest thing. That creates a culture of not accepting constraints. ## Steven Bartlett discusses his guest selection criteria and why personal interest is crucial for long-term sustainability - Unknown (9/1/26 7:12 PM): There's the start about the noise. Yes, yes. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:12 PM): So in the faster let's go to the faster let's just say you already explained how you choose uh Robert Caper like the guests you choose to be on the podcast. Okay so that part makes sense. Now you do the interview. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:12 PM): Walk me through your prep. How do you press? What are the prompts you use? What do you do to come up with the questions? And prompts, you use a lot of props right? You bring props on the show as well. Then after the interview is it take the transcript, put it in AI, give me the best stories, what's force the highest, eliminate anything we lost 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. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:13 PM): Yeah, I have to start with this guess election for you because it's my song that we just pick their study of the best, perform the best, but that is a violation of this principle. I told you about long termism. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:13 PM): Um, so there's kind of three things that circles that overlap. One of them is do I think my units will like it. Um, 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. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:13 PM): Which means sometimes my team will say to me, oh, I wish I could show you the list of names on my list. They'll say the biggest person in the world, biggest movie star in the world, leader of this country, 170 million followers, and if it's a violate if I 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. ## Steven Bartlett explains his interview preparation style and why great interviewing relies on active listening rather than prepared questions - Unknown (9/1/26 7:14 PM): Um 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 never attempt to write a question down. The the the research process is me getting really, really curious about this person, and then I think great interviewers they don't lead, they follow. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:14 PM): 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 Chris Chris Camara. 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 like, you know, sports personalities. And I asked him the first question, and he he couldn't speak like properly. And I didn't know that. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:15 PM): He has a disease, which means that he's he's basically losing his ability to speak. So you found this interview, as a matter of fact I planned that interview and I had 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 and so profound that that weekend across football stadiums, cross the entirety of the Premier League, they had banner saying you're not a fraud can because he's in the conversation saying I feel like a fraud. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:15 PM): And so I've got so many examples from the you know the history of my show watching other shows where people everybody in this room has had someone listen to them for 10 minutes in their life uninhibited. So people will subconsciously take you to where they want to go if you just listen. And my job is basically to follow them. Actually learn this from spies. This is actually quite a good negotiation, sales, trick. Um quite quite interestingly, there's a guy called Julian Treasure who started two Ted talks. One about speaking, 50 million views. One about listening, two million views. ## Steven Bartlett shares listening and negotiation techniques learned from CIA spies, including the RICE framework - Unknown (9/1/26 7:16 PM): What does that say about us as humans? But when you sit with spies, I mean and Patrick had 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 that ideology. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:16 PM): And he said that to me, he said, in spy school, there's the framework to motivate and 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 ego, rics. And he says we think the most you know the things people are most incentivized by is rewards, money, or in some countries there might be alcohol or drugs. He goes thing that drives people the most when you're a CIA spy is ideology. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:16 PM): And he said to me, he said, everybody in this room has three lives. The 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 you into your secret life, and he said he could get any secret from your secret life within nine months. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:17 PM): There might be spies here today, because you used to come to conferences like this, in far away lands, he'd bump into you when you're having a 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 you'd get a taxi where the taxi driver was driving a government official, and he would spend seven weeks just listening to the guy offload. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:17 PM): That is what I think is both the art of great sales people, 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 in rics, he would make you an offer to fly you and your son out of his country to get professional medical care in the US if you sell secrets on in-state country. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:18 PM): Reward ideology coercion ego. Ideology is the most powerful. Number two, Andrew said, - Unknown (9/1/26 7:18 PM): Ego. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:18 PM): He said we all have an ego. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:18 PM): Even mother Theresa has an ego. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:18 PM): He said to me, not just on Trump, mother Theresa also has an ego. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:18 PM): Number three is wrong word, which is the things people want. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:18 PM): And number four is collusion, which is pressure. ## Steven Bartlett explains how he applies negotiation frameworks to hiring and tailoring job offers to candidates' ideologies - Unknown (9/1/26 7:18 PM): So I apply this framework to everything in my life, especially when it comes to interviewing people in hiring. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:18 PM): I 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. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:18 PM): Meet this from Amazon, which announced Ada who's at Amazon for seven years building their AI applications. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:18 PM): She's joined as my CTO. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:18 PM): I will sit in that interview for two hours just letting the person offloaded me. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:18 PM): Tell me everything about your life, your ideology, the chip on your shoulder, the person that overlooked you in school. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:18 PM): And then I have that information. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:18 PM): I can tailor my offer to your ideology. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:18 PM): So that's when I joined the interviews. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:18 PM): I let the person give me their ideology, and I followed them. ## Steven Bartlett discusses eliminating guesswork in creative decisions through rigorous testing - Unknown (9/1/26 7:18 PM): 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. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:19 PM): And, yeah, and then once the interview is taking place, there's a huge testing process that takes place. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:19 PM): And, you know, in the modern world, you don't have to be guessing for creative decisions. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:19 PM): You don't have to guess what your website should say. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:19 PM): You don't have to guess what your your product that's going into Target or Costco should say. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:19 PM): You can test all of these things. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:19 PM): And this this idea of killing guesswork at all at all instances is, like, foundation to my success in any creative discipline. ## Steven Bartlett shares how a simple testing process for a podcast episode resulted in a 2000% performance increase - Unknown (9/1/26 7:19 PM): I remember one of the early podcast conversations I had with this guy called MobileNet. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:19 PM): First time we ran a testing process to figure out how to package it, how to edit it. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:19 PM): And the worst performing guess delivered 1%. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:19 PM): Let's just say 1% as a simple way to think about it. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:19 PM): And the best performing guests delivered 20%. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:19 PM): It's the same conversation. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:19 PM): It's the same two, three hours that I spent. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:20 PM): It was the same flight to get Moe to come. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:20 PM): But the variance in performance because I did a $100 test was 2000% increase in performance. ## Steven Bartlett describes his extensive testing process for his book cover and chapters to ensure audience alignment - Unknown (9/1/26 7:20 PM): And so, like, you some of you are gonna write a book someday. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:20 PM): Some of you are gonna think about packaging for your new startup. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:20 PM): Some of you are gonna think about, I don't know, content decisions or whatever. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:20 PM): What I would say is your first question should should be, how do I test which one will perform the best? - Unknown (9/1/26 7:20 PM): I have a book coming out too. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:20 PM): I ran 400 tests to figure out what my audience wanted the book cover to be before I put a pen and put put a pen and paper. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:20 PM): And my audience, 14.8% of the time, clicked the title, just fucking do it. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:20 PM): 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? - Unknown (9/1/26 7:20 PM): I put the book together, but it didn't stop there. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:20 PM): I then took the book. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:20 PM): I had 3,000 members of my audience receive a randomized chapter. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:20 PM): We watched our eyes as they read the book, start to finish. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:20 PM): At the end of the book, they say whether it was life changing, cliche, and then I deleted three chapters. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:21 PM): Again, being unromantic. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:21 PM): Three of my favorite chapters, I deleted. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:21 PM): So my approach to everything is how do we call the best work? - Unknown (9/1/26 7:21 PM): Because everything else is a tax on your your potential. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:21 PM): It's inefficiency. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:21 PM): You know? - Unknown (9/1/26 7:21 PM): And that's probably fascinating. ## Steven Bartlett discusses editing down long interviews and how much content typically gets cut - Unknown (9/1/26 7:21 PM): So if you do how many guys if you wanna ask a question, line up now because I'm we're only gonna get a couple of them selfish. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:21 PM): I've taken the entire - Unknown (9/1/26 7:21 PM): time because I'm enjoying the conversation so much, - Unknown (9/1/26 7:21 PM): and I could go for three more hours with you. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:21 PM): But if you do a two hour interview, let's say it's exactly a hundred and twenty minutes, what is the likelihood of this thing that's a hundred and twenty minutes? - Unknown (9/1/26 7:21 PM): When it goes live and it's posted, what do you think it'll end up? - Unknown (9/1/26 7:21 PM): Depends on how good the conversation is. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:21 PM): Give me best case, worst case. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:21 PM): Best case is a hundred and twenty minutes. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:22 PM): Okay. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:22 PM): A hundred twenty. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:22 PM): So that's too much. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:22 PM): Maybe a 100 maybe a hundred minutes. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:22 PM): Also, you only would cut twenty minutes. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:22 PM): Yeah. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:22 PM): I wouldn't I wouldn't read something like sixty minutes. ## Steven Bartlett explains restructuring interviews and moving late-stage stories to the beginning for better narrative flow - Unknown (9/1/26 7:22 PM): Do you ever start your intro? - Unknown (9/1/26 7:22 PM): And let's just say the intro, you look at it afterwards, sports, low. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:22 PM): Do you cut it and say we start in a different way? - Unknown (9/1/26 7:22 PM): Yeah. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:22 PM): Yeah. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:22 PM): We move things around. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:22 PM): You do move things around? - Unknown (9/1/26 7:22 PM): Do you ever bring the story that's maybe in the eightieth minute, ninetieth minute and put it in the tenth minute? - Unknown (9/1/26 7:22 PM): It it depends if it fits the story. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:22 PM): Yes. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:22 PM): I'd be untroubling romantic about those things. ## Steven Bartlett shares an example of restructuring an interview with Dane Cook to move a sensitive childhood discussion to the start - Unknown (9/1/26 7:22 PM): So it'd be sort of. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:22 PM): Do you - Unknown (9/1/26 7:22 PM): sub parts not think about it? - Unknown (9/1/26 7:22 PM): Because try - Unknown (9/1/26 7:22 PM): to give you an example. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:22 PM): Yesterday, had to be dating a boy. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:22 PM): And I was I opened up about his childhood, but I often find that people dating has been very open that he doesn't like talking about his childhood. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:22 PM): He had a very, you know, tumultuous childhood. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:22 PM): His mother turned against him and wrote a book about him that is critical of him. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:22 PM): His dad was an alcoholic. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:22 PM): Divorced you know, they divorced at seven years old. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:22 PM): Both of his parents then died. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:22 PM): Dane is on the record. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:22 PM): He said in interviews, he didn't care when they died. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:22 PM): He told nothing. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:23 PM): So I knew I knew that I'm gonna have to earn the trust to then go back to his childhood later, and that's what I did. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:23 PM): So probably, I think, seventy five 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 Vayner. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:23 PM): I don't know who he's become. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:23 PM): Money has changed him. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:23 PM): And I pulled it out, and I prefaced it by talking about some of my own struggles with my mom. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:23 PM): And I said, can we talk about this? - Unknown (9/1/26 7:23 PM): And he opened up about it. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:23 PM): So I I looked at that and go, actually, that section is really important context to go near at the start. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:23 PM): So maybe, you know, we'll we'll move that closer to the start. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:23 PM): Okay. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:23 PM): And it will make perfect sense when you watch it. ## Steven Bartlett explains how to maximize average view duration by immediately delivering on the packaging promise - Unknown (9/1/26 7:23 PM): Would you choose the intro and you should take soundbite? - Unknown (9/1/26 7:23 PM): What what do you what prompts do you use to choose? - Unknown (9/1/26 7:23 PM): What soundbite makes it the best to put it at the beginning? - Unknown (9/1/26 7:24 PM): What's the science behind that? - Unknown (9/1/26 7:24 PM): Yeah. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:24 PM): So most platforms, most social platforms are driven by this thing called AVD, average view duration, which is just how long people watch. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:24 PM): That's a simple way to think about it. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:24 PM): So if you wanna 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 on the title, delivered upon as soon as they click within the first first sixty seconds and then thereafter. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:24 PM): So obviously, what's happening with us is we're figuring out how to package the conversation. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:24 PM): And then once we have that data back, we're then making the trailer so that we deliver alignment. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:24 PM): 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 gonna bounce. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:24 PM): That will help your ABD. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:24 PM): So if we discover that the the the packaging people want is how to make a cup of tea, within the first ten, twenty, thirty seconds, you have to start delivering on how to make a cup of tea, or else people will bounce and you're highly ready to do. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:24 PM): Obviously, mister Beast is a prime example of this. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:25 PM): The thumbnail and the title and the packaging will say, we locked a 100 people in a private jet. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:25 PM): The last one's leaves wins a million dollars. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:25 PM): Right? - Unknown (9/1/26 7:25 PM): And then the minute you click, there's now, hello, mister Beast, welcome back to no. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:25 PM): No. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:25 PM): No. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:25 PM): No. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:25 PM): No. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:25 PM): No. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:25 PM): Goes, we put a 100 people in that private jet and the last one's leaves wins a million. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:25 PM): He immediately delivers upon the promise of the packaging, and that's what creates high ABD. ## Steven Bartlett emphasizes a deep obsession with tiny details and a high rate of experimentation as keys to business success - Unknown (9/1/26 7:25 PM): So, yeah, so the the trailer, the intros all the time, I - Unknown (9/1/26 7:25 PM): want one. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:25 PM): It's is that would you put that as one of the most important things on how good the trailer is? - Unknown (9/1/26 7:25 PM): I just think all - Unknown (9/1/26 7:25 PM): things are important. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:25 PM): I really just think all things are important. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:25 PM): So I I really don't think there's one thing. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:25 PM): I know there's, like, a temptation to, like, wonder one thing. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:25 PM): This is why I think the actual principle here is just, like, deep, deep obsession with tiny details Mhmm. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:25 PM): A high rate of experimentation. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:25 PM): This sounds like a crazy thing to say, but outside of some of the important business things like hiring and culture, which we can get into if you wanna talk about that, and I have principles for that as well. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:25 PM): The most important thing is just to care more than your competitors do about small details and try more things. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:26 PM): That's what 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 on to those two principles. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:26 PM): And it's like, I can say this to people who do this. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:26 PM): It's like people don't do it. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:26 PM): They don't do it because it's it's it's not tangible. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:26 PM): It's like religion. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:26 PM): It's like religious. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:26 PM): You have to kinda just have faith because you'll do it tomorrow and nothing will happen. ## Audience members ask questions and discuss Steven Bartlett's likeability and podcast value - Unknown (9/1/26 7:26 PM): So, how much more time do we have? We have a few what so you're good. You're you're not in trouble. Okay. So, this has been makes the most efficient. Probably really - Unknown (9/1/26 7:26 PM): Yeah, one of the things that let me just say this before I'm going to come to you guys, cuz I'm sure you guys want me to come to you ask a question. One of the things for me with with him, 10 to one, I've consumed his interviews where he's being interviewed more than his interviewing others. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:26 PM): I don't know if you understand what I'm saying like I'm I'm more interested on how we think than how he interviews because it's fascinating. And I think one of his superpowers and you know I don't know if - Unknown (9/1/26 7:27 PM): uh we give a lot of credence to this. I would - Unknown (9/1/26 7:27 PM): You're extremely likeable. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:27 PM): You are extremely likeable, and that you guys agree or not how likeable he is. You can tell he's glowing, but my god, it's like this. So, first question we're going to go to ## Dan Martell asks about AI adoption and its impact on hiring and team structures - Unknown (9/1/26 7:27 PM): is Dan Martell. Dan Martell has a question for Stephen Bartlet. Go for it, Dan. Well, Stephen, your value for a minute is off the charts, so thank you for - Unknown (9/1/26 7:27 PM): Uh question when it pertains to talent you mentioned AI. I believe I read a story you guys ran a contest, 60 days, try to get as many people to adopt AI. $20,000 prize. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:27 PM): Uh I think you guys claimed that it saved you 1.2 million in revenue, 60,000 hours, and obviously this was a success. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:27 PM): Do you look at that and say, we need to hire less junior people and or junior 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? ## Steven Bartlett explains how AI agents handle research and operations while human relationships remain crucial for sales - Unknown (9/1/26 7:28 PM): So, um we will continue to hire in roles where - Unknown (9/1/26 7:28 PM): they require irreplaceably human skills. When I went through my org chart after doing this contest and building AI agents across our whole company, we are - Unknown (9/1/26 7:28 PM): part of our thing is about leaning into change. So, whenever there's a change in the world, we we all in our company we mess around at the front end, that's what we call it. So, we messed around at the front end, we understood the tools. I then looked at my org chart and thought, okay, well with AI - Unknown (9/1/26 7:28 PM): Like, you know, why do I need to continue hiring them 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 scare as fast and that's what's happening now. There, my current researchers are using a flock of agents to do the research across my show and all the other shows that we run. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:28 PM): As it relates to sales, interestingly, - Unknown (9/1/26 7:29 PM): because as you guys will know, sales are about relationships. It was, I'm going to be hiring more there than anyone. In fact, I'm halfway through a negotiation to buy a US sales team here in the United States, because - Unknown (9/1/26 7:29 PM): it's a relationship business still. You can't automate the fact that the CMO at Airbnb is going to give their money to the person that she has a relationship with and goes for breakfast with. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:29 PM): So, and then yeah, it's 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. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:29 PM): And this has changed. When I'm looking through all of the applicants we have, AI proficiency is almost unnegotiable now. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:29 PM): Um and then I'd say I have a team of, I don't know, 16 agents probably that work with me every single day. I have one agent that looks at the back end of my YouTube channel every single day, it's downloading all my back end data from my YouTube channel and it goes out scouting to guests - Unknown (9/1/26 7:29 PM): based on the performance of my channel right now. And so every day if I pull up on Monday morning 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 your audience's sentiment, you should consider these five people and actually book someone yesterday that came from that. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:30 PM): I have one agent that's doing my chief of staff triage, looking at all of my inboxes on my WhatsApp, my iMessage, my two email addresses, my Slack channel, my Monday board and every single day it's pulling it together efficiently for staff. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:30 PM): Um - Unknown (9/1/26 7:30 PM): And then I have my my investment funds, interestingly. So, we have a fairly big investment fund, we've done some big investments, SpaceX and Whisperflow and we invested in Crut before they were bought by Nvidia. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:30 PM): And we have Lemon Caters, they're called from that movie, Lemon Caters. I don't much movies, I don't know, some of you will know. Born with the uh Hunger Games, Hunger Games. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:30 PM): Lemon Caters do invest invited jobs. Lem goes out into the well, or Caters goes out into the world and finds targets for us to invest in all day every day. And Lem is on the receiving end of processing the inquiries we get for our investment fund. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:31 PM): This is meant that our investment fund, which is now, you know, a $900 million investment fund, has one employee. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:31 PM): 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 Lem and Caters. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:31 PM): So, the world is changing. It it 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. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:31 PM): You know? - Unknown (9/1/26 7:31 PM): Thanks for that. Thanks for that. Big family up on the down. ## An audience member asks what life experiences transformed Steven Bartlett into a driven entrepreneur - Unknown (9/1/26 7:31 PM): See you all you should come. Hi Stephen. How are you? - Unknown (9/1/26 7:31 PM): Excuse me, still getting my throat after uh nine hours of talking at the sponsor show. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:31 PM): But uh 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're talking about the different models and in my head I was just running at 150 miles an hour. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:31 PM): And I did read your book. I thought it was fantastic. Uh arguably almost as good as Red X5 moves. But - Unknown (9/1/26 7:31 PM): besides that, uh you started saying, you started the conversation and said, oh, I'm really not a smart guy. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:32 PM): I I think everybody in this audience and everybody that follows you could obviously argue against that tremendously. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:32 PM): I'm I'm very curious, genuinely curious. A lot of your things you're saying are surrounded by frameworks, models, principles, and things like that. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:32 PM): What was it that happened in your life? Because you're a fairly young guy. What was it that happened in your life that turns you into the beast that you are today? - Unknown (9/1/26 7:32 PM): Right? What was it, there has to be something. Stephen A shared last night at the CBL session, what was it that happened to him that heard him into that thing, that made him motivated, the thing that happened to Jordan, the thing that happened to whoever it was. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:32 PM): What was that thing for you that turned you into where you're at today? - Unknown (9/1/26 7:32 PM): Um, so just thank you so much for that, that's a compliment. So thank you for that. Um, when I said 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 unexpeled me, my headmaster has been on national TV and said this, he only unexpeled me because I made the school a lot of money. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:33 PM): entrepreneur when I was younger. Um, the great news is in a world where the correct answer is changing this quickly, nobody is really that smart. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:33 PM): And actually, those that are trying the most things and doing what I said about increased Neverlet failure, are the smartest. And I love that about the world. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:33 PM): 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 a the great leveler. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:33 PM): Um to your point about the drive, - Unknown (9/1/26 7:33 PM): I think to some degree, we're all driven or dragged. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:34 PM): And I think for the first, probably 25 years of my life, I was dragged. Like the the way I've described that is there was something in me that was dragging me, it was probably shame. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:34 PM): you will use the cheat state, the expensive state to figure out that the middle the middle state is probably right. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:34 PM): 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, like my maybe ever came to my house because it was smashed to pieces. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:34 PM): Um, we were the weird family, my mom was very, very, very strange. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:34 PM): And I thought that success and money would validate me and make me like a little bit rich white friends and like a lack of money was the reason why I couldn't fit in. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:34 PM): So very, and then I struggled in school so badly that at 14 years old, I realized I remember having the thought very clearly that um, I'm not going to get there by grades. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:34 PM): And so I start these businesses at 14 years old. I start the business at 14, 15 years old. And I realized at 15 years old that I can get my peers - Unknown (9/1/26 7:35 PM): to come to my events or school trips. I oh my god, these people are going to be adults with me. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:35 PM): And actually the most important skill in the world isn't intelligence, it's human psychology. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:35 PM): And I can learn human psychology, so I used to steal the psychology books from the class and I used to think, if I just learn human psychology, I learn about the biggest barriers that we all face, which aren't walls or buildings, they are other people. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:35 PM): 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. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:35 PM): And so, 15 years old, I realized that I'm not going to go to school anymore. I stopped doing. That's why I get expelled. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:35 PM): Um, and I start building businesses. And the shame is, yeah, I was blackish. I was the full blackish. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:36 PM): 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. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:36 PM): I solved the fronts and things that I had and I couldn't give a fuck about fancy things. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:36 PM): 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. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:36 PM): And I honestly, I interview people, I when I'm interviewing them, I'm looking for people who have a chip on their shoulder. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:36 PM): Barbara Corcoran from Shark Tank said to me, of all of her investments, she's done in Shark Tank, she goes, um, I know when the founder is going to be successful because they have early trauma, can be little p trauma, not just big t trauma, little p trauma. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:37 PM): And she goes, when those founders with little p trauma call me and tell me that the business I've invested in is struggling, they do something remarkable that nobody else does. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:37 PM): They call me with the solution attached. They don't just call me and say the business is struggling. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:37 PM): They say the business is struggling and here's what we're going to do about it. Um, and I think that's what you get from that kind of childhood. You get a resilience and a perseverance and a painful mentality and a delusional sense of self belief. ## Steven Bartlett discusses his approach to identifying talent and why recruitment is his highest leverage activity - Unknown (9/1/26 7:38 PM): Amazing. Thank you. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:38 PM): Uh, first and foremost, can we make some noise for Stephen really quick? Make some noise. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:38 PM): What a treat. I thank you so much for booking Stephen. This has been a highlight. I love you, back. This has been a highlight. Oh, thank you so much. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:38 PM): Uh, Stephen, this is in regards to your media company. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:38 PM): Um, in order you 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. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:39 PM): 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. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:39 PM): 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. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:39 PM): You have ambitious opportunities for me to answer that question and then adjacent one. Well, in the first 8 years of my career, I didn't realize that the most important highest leverage thing that I do, whether whether it's building a business or investing or signing creators now, is recruitment. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:40 PM): 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 somewhere along the way, probably in about 30 years old, I realized that the definition of the word company is group of people. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:40 PM): 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 recruiting. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:41 PM): I probably spend, I don't know, 30, 30 hours a week just on recruitment. If you if 60% of the company if the 200 other people that work in just my media company when we sign creators would 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. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:42 PM): And is here now. She she filled out the culture test, got a call from me within we got texted me within like, you know, 10 minutes we were on the phone with each other, flew out that weekend on Saturday. She left her job and she's been looking out for a week, but it's the same with my whole team. ## Steven Bartlett explains the "coach test" and the key traits he looks for in founders - Unknown (9/1/26 7:42 PM): is welcome and then he signed the best, he bought the A and the IP. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:42 PM): She was 81 for some on coach test, whatever it was, really, really high in coach test. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:42 PM): And that's the most important thing. Same with my founders and my portfolio, the coach tests would have been, to check they have the agency, the ambition, the hard work, the capable mentality. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:42 PM): 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. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:42 PM): That's what we test for. ## Steven Bartlett discusses the essential traits of successful creators, including obsession, humility, and reinvention - Unknown (9/1/26 7:42 PM): Um and if you are asking me what it seems to be a great creator, it's just like obsession. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:43 PM): Right. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:43 PM): Um 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. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:43 PM): You have to have humility because all creators at some point fall. If you look back for 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. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:43 PM): So if you want to survive, you have to be willing to reinvent. ## Steven Bartlett shares stories of Ryan Crouser and Tiger Woods to illustrate the necessity of constant reinvention - Unknown (9/1/26 7:43 PM): I actually just wrote an essay to my team a couple of couple of days ago about Ryan Prister. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:43 PM): The US shot put Olympian who's won three gold medals in shot put. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:43 PM): And in the story I I tell of Ryan, in 2023 he decides for the first time ever, um he's going to completely rebuild his his shot. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:43 PM): So what you typically do in shot is you start at the back of the circle, you kind of do this thing and you throw it. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:43 PM): Ryan decided he was going to go right back to the beginning, throw out all the bull bones and come up with a completely different way to throw the shot. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:44 PM): The guy has won three gold medals for the United States. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:44 PM): He now, he's at five days old, starts from the side of the circle, and he figured out because he went back to first principles in physics, he I think he was a data scientist, a physicist, had an interest in physics, he could beat his world record with this completely reinvented shot. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:44 PM): And he did, he came out through the shot starting in the middle of the circle and won the gold medal yet again. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:44 PM): Tiger Woods did the same. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:44 PM): Tiger Woods was at what, 19 years old on the PGA tour? - Unknown (9/1/26 7:44 PM): And then looked at his own swim on video and said, I think I need to rebuild my swim if I'm going to become the greatest in the world. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:44 PM): He spent two years failing with this completely new swing, not winning anything. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:44 PM): Everybody said Tiger should should have done this, rebuild his new swing and became as many people would say the greatest of all time. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:44 PM): This idea of constant reinvention has to be at the heart of your business and personal philosophy and it's not possible if you're romantic. ## Steven Bartlett discusses loss aversion and why successful businesses must remain self-disruptive to survive - Unknown (9/1/26 7:44 PM): So I I wrote that letter to my team about Tiger, about Ryan, because we're now, you know, we're going to be the most prescribed podcast in the world in 60 days. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:45 PM): Well, and what what happens? What does history say happens when someone becomes successful? - Unknown (9/1/26 7:45 PM): They get involved in this thing called loss aversion. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:45 PM): Daniel Kahneman, the great psychologist who passed away last year, found that if you lose $10 on the floor, if you then found $10 on the floor, it doesn't make up for losing $10. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:45 PM): You have to find $20 to make up for losing $10. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:45 PM): Something within us doesn't like to lose things that we have, so we go into defense. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:45 PM): Um and history, one of my favorite books is the Innovator's Dilemma, it case studies why successful people lose their success. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:45 PM): And it's because you and the book it says, you do exactly what you're supposed to do. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:45 PM): You start listening to your customers. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:46 PM): You give your customers exactly what you they want, and your customers keep you trapped. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:46 PM): You get trapped in what they call sustaining your success. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:46 PM): But to win in the next S curve, you have to be self disruptive. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:46 PM): Um and this is not something that comes naturally. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:46 PM): So we look for great humanity 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. ## Steven Bartlett explains how ignorance of industry norms allowed him to innovate and succeed in podcasting - Unknown (9/1/26 7:46 PM): Um I think this is, you know, I want to think uh It kind of links to what I was saying about paper walls, this idea of um self destruction, because also there'll be a lot of you in this room that want to start a podcast, or want to follow in the footsteps of someone was that was successful. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:47 PM): And actually my advice would be um to, you know, the reason why we were successful in podcasting was because we knew nothing about podcasting. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:47 PM): 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 a hundred plus. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:47 PM): I had no idea every podcast wasn't testing the title 400 times before they published. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:47 PM): I had no preconceptions, so I was unincumbered by convention and status quo. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:48 PM): And that's where innovation comes from. ## Steven Bartlett uses the horse and carriage analogy to illustrate why successful companies fail to adopt disruptive innovations - Unknown (9/1/26 7:48 PM): The Innovator's Dilemma shows, you know, that it 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 half. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:48 PM): And the book says, the current successful person almost never takes part in the next innovation. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:48 PM): And the reason for this can be seen in, you know, the horse and carriage industry in the 1800s. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:48 PM): 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. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:49 PM): I'd go, Patrick, tell me about cars. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:49 PM): Are they faster than the horses? - Unknown (9/1/26 7:49 PM): At the time, and this is always the case with innovation, it's always worse. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:49 PM): Patrick would say, no, there's actually a law where you have to walk in front of a car with a red flag. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:49 PM): They go five miles an hour. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:49 PM): Next question, are our current customers asking for cars? - Unknown (9/1/26 7:49 PM): No. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:49 PM): They want faster horses. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:49 PM): Are we set up from a supply chain perspective to make cars? No, no, no, no, no, we have stables. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:49 PM): We're set up to make faster horses. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:49 PM): I would tell him to get out of fucking office. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:49 PM): And then my colleague comes in and says, boss, I've got a new idea. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:50 PM): Patrick was terrible, I've got an idea. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:50 PM): What is it? Faster horses. ## Steven Bartlett discusses how the growth of his podcast has reinforced his core principles - Unknown (9/1/26 7:50 PM): noise. And initials like principles are like so important because principles help perceive through noise. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:50 PM): And the more the bigger the podcast get, you know you BBC documentary on my podcast saying it's the wisest one in the world and it's whatever. Like all it's done is maybe more um clear on my principles. Why I'm doing this, how I'm doing it and who I'm doing it for. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:50 PM): So yeah. There you go. I'll kill this right over here. ## Steven Bartlett shares his perspective on Web3, currency transfer, and the potential resurgence of NFTs - Unknown (9/1/26 7:50 PM): Good evening, good evening and happy Tuesday. Um, thank you for putting this together and the opportunity to stand here in front of you. Um, I have a question about uh something that you had mentioned earlier, which is monetizing or uh how we to make money off your audience, or owning your audience, right? - Unknown (9/1/26 7:50 PM): Um, what are your thoughts on web 3.0? Where do you see that going? And do you have a plan to integrate that into what you're already doing? - Unknown (9/1/26 7:51 PM): So, I found a company in 20 we say 2020 called Bubble, which is probably the second bad biggest web 3 infrastructure platform. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:51 PM): We raised a fair million dollars from Shopify and Coinbase and others for that platform. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:51 PM): Um, I think I think Web3 will have a big impact on currency and the transfer of value, but I don't I can't yet see a use case as it relates to um content. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:51 PM): This is a controversial opinion, but I actually think that NFTs are going to come back. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:51 PM): Not all of them. Most of it was, you know, BS, but just like art is about ownership and story and uh sentiment, I think I think some of those things like Punks. I was thinking the other day of buying crypto Punks because I really think it's all the first principles suggest that having digital assets and something that has an unmuted story like crypto Punks is going to be a big thing. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:51 PM): But as it relates to content, it's just not interesting at the moment. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:52 PM): Um, so I'm not thinking much about it. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:52 PM): Thank you. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:52 PM): Yeah. So I saw a couple of people clap for NFTs. Did you spend a lot of money on NFTs? You're hoping they come back. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:52 PM): A few people here, that's a very different thing. Interesting. Let's do one last one right here, go for it before we wrap up. ## Steven Bartlett recommends books on business strategy and explains Amazon's 'working backwards' framework - Unknown (9/1/26 7:52 PM): Hey Steven, I just have a very simple question for you. You know all these others have been very good. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:52 PM): Uh what books would you recommend for us as business leaders that we can read regarding the experimentation, implementing that into our culture uh and having our leaders duplicate those with the people that report to them. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:52 PM): Yeah, so the first one I would ask you to read is The Slight Edge, which is the book that I read back in 18 about small things. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:52 PM): I'm going to say The Blue Ocean Strategy. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:52 PM): Again, really helps you think about how to differentiate yourself. And in the world of AI where the motes are collapsing, I think it's more important now to understand uh to get out of a red ocean, which is a highly competitive market and into a blue ocean, which is uncharted territory and it gives you frameworks for how to do that for your business. What to do more of, what to do less of to create a real durable moat. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:53 PM): And then, try and plug my own book. I think I'll chapter there. I'll be really mad next is what? - Unknown (9/1/26 7:53 PM): Uh, I'm going to I'm going to say there's a book called Working Backwards, which is a book by two Amazon insiders who were there, I think for like two decades, and they explain how Amazon internally make decisions. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:53 PM): And there's some things in there that have really, really helped me. Um, one of them and again Arto who I meet just like from Amazon is really helping me to understand is they work they always work backwards from the customer. Actually, in their meetings they have an empty seat, which is the customer in all their meetings. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:53 PM): Because sometimes we can work forward from our bias when we're thinking about what products to make or people to have on the show or what podcast or whatever, but Jeff's Jeff's real skill was always working backwards from the customer's pain point. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:53 PM): So now when it comes to like my new YouTube channels or a product launch or whatever, we persona the customer and we work backwards from their known problems to a to a product. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:54 PM): That's really, really helping think for me. And it's also given all of my team a framework to think about any product development at all. So yeah, working backwards. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:54 PM): Thank you so much. ## Steven Bartlett discusses the neuroscience of hardship and why resisting the temptation to defer thinking to AI is crucial - Unknown (9/1/26 7:54 PM): Thank you. Should we go one more, let's do one more, okay. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:54 PM): I want a really good one though. Is that Wouter? Dimitri, is that you? - Unknown (9/1/26 7:54 PM): Yes. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:54 PM): Ah, Dimitri, I'll come to you. I'll come to you, go for it. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:54 PM): Okay. Uh, Kimberly with Eagle Root? - Unknown (9/1/26 7:54 PM): No no no, I said the the B, right over here. Dimitri, go for it. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:54 PM): 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 proofread it for me. Now AI does it. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:54 PM): I have five kids. My oldest is 18. My kids hate AI with a passion. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:54 PM): Wow. They don't let me do anything. Like 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 that AI? - Unknown (9/1/26 7:55 PM): So my kids think that AI makes you lazy, makes you less creative, uh that it's bad for everyone and I'm constantly fighting this. They hate ChatGPT, they hate Claude and I can't figure it out. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:55 PM): Why new generation and like part of me likes it because I hate AI content as well. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:55 PM): What's your take and what data do you have on kids and AI? - Unknown (9/1/26 7:55 PM): So, I a friend of mine's Andrew Huberman, um, he's actually just been on the show last week again at the house. And I remember Andrew Huberman talking about this part of the brain called the anterior midcingulate cortex. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:55 PM): 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's 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 at the top in the middle. Um, the remarkable thing about this part of your brain is it grows when you do things you actively resist and don't want to do. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:56 PM): So we've looked for a long time that why do some why do some people really, really good? Like you know David Goggins, could go out and run 100 kilometers to the airport with bags on his back. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:56 PM): Well, actually, the science on this is remarkable. People that do hard things have a big anterior midcingulate cortex. Older generations have big anterior midcingulate cortex than their kids, who have been swiping on social media and having much more comfortable lives. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:56 PM): Athletes have the biggest anterior midcingulate cortex. People that are lazy or mostly out of shape have smaller anterior midcingulate cortexes. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:56 PM): And all of this is to say that um hardship today neurologically sets you up to be able to solve hard problems tomorrow. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:57 PM): 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. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:57 PM): Like even to know the right question to ask a large language model um requires a huge amount of of of context and understanding. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:57 PM): Like 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 like deep understanding of a problem. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:57 PM): So, one of the things that I'm doing now with that I've designated in my entire life is writing. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:57 PM): 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. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:58 PM): I write more memos on a weekly basis without a shadow of a doubt than anybody in this room. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:58 PM): 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. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:58 PM): I think when everybody goes right and this goes to the poles rising at the same time for the name earlier, when everybody starts to defer their thinking to AI, I think the people that are going to build the best companies because they need the right questions to ask and they understand the context are going to be those that don't. ## The host concludes the interview, praises Steven Bartlett, and teases a surprise guest for the evening - Unknown (9/1/26 7:58 PM): dates too. Glad you can finish off on Stephen. Uh, FYI, you know what I also like about Stephen? That's maybe a mix to maybe let's come over here. Look at his taste in shoes. I was going to say that. I have no clue this guy has such great taste. Look at his shoes. Can you show the bottom of those shoes the man's got. How many guys love Stephen Bartlett being here? - Unknown (9/1/26 7:58 PM): So, our date for next year's ball are August 30th to September 1st, August 31st to September 1st. I'm already telling you, look at your date, if you're available, we want to have you back. Thanks so much. - Unknown (9/1/26 7:59 PM): Woo. And all the signings work their way up to the back of everybody. Those wraps that you're going to wrap up here in a second. So, biggest takeaways, scream out what your biggest takeaway was from Stephen Bartlett. What did you learn? - Unknown (9/1/26 7:59 PM): What is you're learn? How many of you guys just got inspired to maybe start showing or a podcast? How many guys got inspired to do that? - Unknown (9/1/26 7:59 PM): What a fascinating thing he just talked about. And by the way, just so you guys know, um I don't know why somebody just texted me. They're going to be here in this evening to sit down with. This is He's a goat in his face and he's going to be coming right afterwards. I think at 7 o'clock or 8, he'll be right here coming afterwards tonight.