Nick Quah
Appearances
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why every company wants a podcast now
There's just so many competitors in it, so many participants. That doesn't mean that you can't carve out your space in the universe, that you can't sort of go from zero to one in any of these pockets. But the other layer here is that podcasting over the past...
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why every company wants a podcast now
one two years it's gone through a pretty radical transformation on the one hand it's gone through a huge sort of period of contraction after spotify and a lot of big money came into the business but also now it's just being sort of absorbed and eaten up by video like it's it is emerging in many senses with youtube as an ecosystem in ways that i think folks who need to build businesses in the space are embracing because it means more guaranteed money but it also means that it's its identity is kind of little like
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why every company wants a podcast now
little squishy right now. Is it audio? Is it video? Is it YouTube? Like, what is it not within YouTube?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why every company wants a podcast now
This is precisely what I'm referring to when I'm talking about this identity crisis that podcasting is going through over the past year. Is it video? Is it audio? Historically, in the past 10 to 15 years, when we're talking about podcasts, we've mostly thought about it as an audio-first medium. Of course, that was never exclusively the case.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why every company wants a podcast now
For example, Joe Rogan, for as long as he's been making podcasts, has also been taping and posting those interviews on YouTube. So this strand, this species, this substrate has existed for a very long time. And now it's becoming centered because it is, for many reasons, economically more viable and economically more lucrative to do that.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why every company wants a podcast now
But to your point, I'm reading study after study or reading interview after interview of that like kids these days or young people these days. The youths. The youths. Podcasting is... Equivalent to video. And a lot of the new audiences that come into the space are equating podcasts with video. I think it's phenomenal that's specific to podcasting.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why every company wants a podcast now
I think very similar conversations, though not in such bold terms, are playing out, say, in movies and business. Like, what is television? It is streaming. Is it streaming? Is it... you know, a thing that you get on your idiot box.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why every company wants a podcast now
And also this whole notion of Netflix considering YouTube a primary competitor and also YouTube being considered a major streaming competitor to Netflix and everything else. So we're in this space where everything's kind of just piled together into a giant sludge.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why every company wants a podcast now
This is my struggle. This is the thing that I've been sort of working through in 2024. Because you can take one or two positions. You can take the position of what you believe historically a word should mean, or you can attack it from a position of what people think the word means, right? And I am discovering in 2024 that the story, the story is...
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why every company wants a podcast now
how the word has shifted, how the concept has shifted. I am still a huge consumer of podcasts as an audio file distributed over the RSS feed in the open web and a certain culture that emerges from that. But I also understand that language is flexible. The way we think about platforms, the way we think about any medium that's
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why every company wants a podcast now
Yeah, I mean, the only reason that we're talking about the Elliot Management story there is that it's the novelty of the fact that they did it as a podcast, right? Like if Warren Buffett turns around tomorrow and goes like, yo, the next Berkshire Hathaway annual report, I'm going to drop it as an audiobook only or a podcast only, then it's a much bigger story than what it was.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why every company wants a podcast now
But, you know, I think it's an attention-grabbing thing, and it succeeded for what Elliot Management did. It's like they got access and a bunch of people to write about it.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why every company wants a podcast now
Two caveats. One is I'm no political analyst. Two, I think still it's pretty important to try to hold space for the fact that there are two separate things going on. There is just like the larger political math of the election. Like, there will be books and books and books and hours and hours of people gabbing about basically conducting the autopsy of this.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why every company wants a podcast now
To what I said, was it political communication? Was it just the nature of the economy? That will be sorted elsewhere. But I think from the very specific lane of if you are a national political candidate and you're engaging in a political communication strategy, if it is not apparent, if one has not internalized the fact that
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why every company wants a podcast now
whatever you mean by the old-school traditional textbook of how you put a campaign out, if that hasn't already been rethought and did, this is the election that should switch every political communication advisor's book straight up. It's not enough to do the broadcast networks. It's not enough to do the national papers.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why every company wants a podcast now
It's not enough to do the local papers, to the extent that local papers still exist. One has to internalize and grok the fact that everything that we've been saying that has become truisms but not quite felt about media being fragmented, about political polarization expressing itself not just in media products, but media platforms. This is all true.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why every company wants a podcast now
And if podcasts like Jorgen or whatever are not held in equal standing as something like the New York Times editorial opinion board, you're not quite caught up with the way things are right now. I think the other big learning for me, the other sort of sense that I got from this election is that
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why every company wants a podcast now
It is important, perhaps now more so than ever, to really, truly engage people where they are, which could mean, if you were the Harris campaign, or any Democrat at this point, to go on a show like Rogan, to go on even, say, The Daily Wire. Like, Ben Shapiro is a very huge show.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why every company wants a podcast now
Go increase your presence, because it's one of those things where, like, if you are not in that show, or if you're not even in that ecosystem, you've immersed that foot, even as an antagonist, Chances are, I don't think anybody knows that you even exist. And that's kind of the expression or the result of a society in which there are multiple media realities, right?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why every company wants a podcast now
I think one of the bigger, maybe overarching theoretical question here is that do we still have mainstream media or do we have multiple mainstream media?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why every company wants a podcast now
I'm sort of in the beginning process of thinking that maybe actually, I don't want to read too much into the uniqueness of the podcast interview as a form because radio exists, right? Broadcast radio exists, but the thing that we're kind of, I think, still unpacking is specifically Trump's appearance across the atmosphere, right?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why every company wants a podcast now
The sort of crown jewel appearance there is his appearance on Jorgen, but Trump also spent a ton of time kicking it with flagrant, with Andrew Schultz. Spent a lot of time, he went to Adan Ross's kickstream and was gifted a Tesla. There's a certain, what's the word, performative difference there. There's a certain kind of experiential difference there.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why every company wants a podcast now
And you can actually sort of start drawing out that analysis by just comparing how Harris did when she went on to uncall her daddy, right? She sounded exactly like she does if she was on the television. She sounded exactly as she was when she was on Charlamagne's show on the radio.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why every company wants a podcast now
Whereas Trump, and here I want to sort of, before I move into this like caveat that maybe we're just talking about him specifically being very good at this, but the whole hanging out thing is, really works. And the whole hanging out thing contributes to the sense that I assume a lot of American voters were looking for about like, that person is a real person.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why every company wants a podcast now
And that person I can connect with and empathize more so than any other politician that really has to watch what they have to say. Again, is this a new replicatable political communications strategy? I I don't know. I don't think I've seen anyone. Maybe Federman. John Federman has done something as close as Bernie, definitely. He's very good.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why every company wants a podcast now
I'm not so sure he hangs out as well, but he is pretty charismatic in very long stretches. But that is the thing I think you're kind of touching on, is the qualitative difference of being a good guest in a very long podcast format. That is something very few people can do.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why every company wants a podcast now
I agree. I also want to make sure that we orient ourselves in a sort of analytical space where it's multifactorial. It's not just the fact that Trump was a very uniquely good baby guest. And there is a difference between being a good podcast host and a good podcast guest. A sort of mental test that I play is that nobody cares if a Democratic candidate goes on Crooked Media.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why every company wants a podcast now
I think you walk into that episode as a listener, more or less knowing what you're going to get. I think part of the appeal here, part of the interestingness here is the novelty itself, right? This is a presidential candidate who went on a bunch of podcasts, like who the fuck knows what a podcast is, like in certain parts of the country, hosted by a bunch of boys and men.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why every company wants a podcast now
These were not political players. So the novelty of that to bring it full circle, not like the novelty of outlet management, advancing an active show campaign using a podcast. The novelty there, I think, is part of the power here. And so I want to read a lot into this, but I also think that there is some distance and some self-restraint about reading too much into this.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why every company wants a podcast now
What I'm looking for is specifically that question, you're right. Whether YouTube is going to completely and fully eat podcasting in terms of its identity and what that means for who are the major players that come out of that. And obviously setting that within a larger context of is all media just going to be this?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why every company wants a podcast now
Will we see just a collapse of anything that resembles good journalistic form, etc. Things can change really quickly. Who knew that Twitter slash X was going to become like this a couple of years ago.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why every company wants a podcast now
But specifically within the timeframe between now and the next midterms, I think it's pretty obvious that there will just be more attention paid to whatever, however you define, like both podcasts and YouTube, I want to say, like this kind of species of creators, creators that have cultivated a very sizable audience among listeners that
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why every company wants a podcast now
can be considered quote-unquote news avoiders, or who are not reading the papers, who are not watching broadcast television. That's all in play. That's all, I think, that's table stakes at this point. It might change in terms of who is up and who's down. Audience sizes might change. But that dynamic, from a coverage standpoint, just from thinking this one through, it's like,
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why every company wants a podcast now
How big is Jorgen going to go? And who else is going to be as important as this person? Is this some sort of return to an era which it's radio first, right? Columnists, radio first columnist style people are sort of the major sort of powerful voices in this country.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why every company wants a podcast now
That is something that I think will be what I'll be watching out next couple of years, in addition to just like what happens to the rest of the podcast ecosystem.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why every company wants a podcast now
There are people who built institutions. and there are people who find out what the next thing is, right? And maybe it's not just the media space, it's anything, right? Like, you know, the first social media platform, like, started, and then the game becomes, like, how do you institutionalize it?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why every company wants a podcast now
And there's always going to be that tension, and there's always going to be some coexistence between the two spaces. Right now, yes, I think that the sort of conversation that we're having, or the thing that's interesting now is, like, how does this particular style of outreach and political communication and communication at large, how does it institutionalize? How does it become the norm?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why every company wants a podcast now
And will it become boring? Will it become predictable? We're having not dissimilar conversations in television movies, right? For a while, like, are all movies going to be three hours long and IP-based? For a while, it seems like that's all we're ever going to get. But at some point... It becomes stale, becomes expected, and it collapses into itself. And then new things emerge from the ashes.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why every company wants a podcast now
And that is going to be the case here as well, if it's not within podcasting, whatever it looks like in three to four years. I think the sort of more tricky question is, is it going to happen really quickly? But I do feel like... No, nothing stays in place forever.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why every company wants a podcast now
I genuinely believe it is so much hard to launch stuff that it returns there ultimately. If your business model, your goal, the outcome you seek is to build an institution that outlives you, go for it. But if the goal, if the outcome that you seek is to increase your presence... If it's a political candidate, it is to increase presence such that you can win an election.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why every company wants a podcast now
If you're an executive, if the goal there is to increase your presence so that you might be considered for a CEO job at another company or whatever, don't build your own stuff. Just go everywhere. Be ubiquitous. I think the large way that we've been thinking about media ecosystems over the past couple of years is that everybody's building their own little fiefdoms.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why every company wants a podcast now
Everybody's in their little fiefdoms and everybody lives in their own alternate reality. What's better than that? If a billion dollars is better than a million dollars, what's better than building your own reality is to be in everybody else's. That's the game.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why every company wants a podcast now
I read about Elite Management's effort, let's call it, on Axios. And I was like, this sounds super weird, what's going on here. And the immediate question then comes, what is the bigger punch here? Is the bigger punch here the headline about it, or is it the actual thing? that is being created. And I think it's largely the former more so than the latter.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why every company wants a podcast now
The novelty of the existence of a capital firm launching a podcast in order to advance an activist shareholder campaign, it's a strategy, it's a little ploy, it's a gambit. I think you're touching upon something really interesting here in the sense of we just lived through this quote-unquote podcast election
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why every company wants a podcast now
in which there's a very clear display of let's call it alternative media power in the sense of like a stakeholder of certain powers trying to express their will without having to go through mainstream media and going directly whatever that means.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why every company wants a podcast now
uh in this case in pretty much it was the trump campaign going through uh to their sort of constituency of young white men to these you know very robust built up alternative media platforms and here what you're describing i think is an expression of a misunderstanding of the big lesson here the lesson is not to start your own silly little podcast to like um engage with whatever constituency you want to express whatever will you want
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why every company wants a podcast now
The lesson there is to look at the state of play, look at where people actually are, and go to them where they are as opposed to making your own thing.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why every company wants a podcast now
There's this progression, right? It used to be blogs. Maybe it was a newsletter at some point, CEOs wrote books or whatever. But, um, the question there is that like, has that mode of expression, has that mode of communication or propaganda, whatever you want to call it, has it ever been effective? And like, what is the sort of frame and the, and the lines of attack for that particular thing?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why every company wants a podcast now
mode of outreach. So the example you gave, if you're a 22-year-old musician rolling out your music on TikTok or a couple years ago, SoundCloud, right? That is a different power dynamic, right? That musician has no power. So they're essentially just pulling the slot machine levers of the internet to see if they can increase their power again in front of more people.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why every company wants a podcast now
When it comes to something like investors trying to shape a message, trying to build their brand, they already have a copious amount of power there. And what's actually happening If they do carve together a following or community around whether it's a podcast or their blog, it is more of just sharpening their image in front of a pretty well sort of bought-in following.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why every company wants a podcast now
Because we live in a country and a world that there's no shortage of people who view VCs as godly figures, who kind of treat them as idols and stars. And so the power dynamic there is just brand management.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why every company wants a podcast now
You know, we'll start with a couple of layers here. I do believe in this sort of like way of consuming media that like, for every piece of media, there is somebody who will love it. No matter how badly done it is, which a lot of these are, no matter how poorly edited these are, and how esoteric they can be. And yes, to some extent, that is interesting, right?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why every company wants a podcast now
And it does come from the sort of historical tradition of what a podcast actually is, which is just an audio blog. Like at the very beginning of its inception, it was just people kind of publishing without having to go through any mediators, just anything they wanted to get to anybody who would want it. And there's something inherently powerful about that.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why every company wants a podcast now
And yeah, there's definitely going to be a community of fanboys and fangirls and fanpeople who are really into whatever two VCs want to say because they want to be VCs or whatever. Like, there's something generally interesting there. But is there something more interesting about just hearing two VCs shit to shit and, you know, and Galaxy brain it out loud versus reading a sort of composed blog?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why every company wants a podcast now
Maybe. Maybe there is. Again, it sort of really depends on what exactly the situation is because, like... I can listen to a badly edited three hour long podcast about the Oklahoma City Thunder because I'm a fan of the Oklahoma City Thunder. And I do do that in my own personal life. And I'm sure for some people that is true if they're really into the VC world and they listen to
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why every company wants a podcast now
to people that they maybe admire or want to do business with talk out loud. There's a certain kind of performance of transparency there. There's also a performance of hanging out there. There's a lot of these sort of dynamics that kind of roll into it.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why every company wants a podcast now
They like meet people. Acquired is the big one I think about. Yeah.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why every company wants a podcast now
Yes, actually, yes. This is becoming familiar to me. There's also this show that first launched many, many years ago called The Pitch. But this also reminds me of like... JJ Reddick hosting a podcast at LeBron and then suddenly becoming the Lakers head coach. I'm also on YouTube.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why every company wants a podcast now
I sometimes watch this YouTuber called Dunkey, and he recently created a video game studio publishing house after years and years of making content about video games. This, I think, yeah, it's interesting. There's this sort of, you're right, it's this two direction meeting in the middle or like both things happening at the same time.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why every company wants a podcast now
I do find it lazy to say that, oh my gosh, late-stage techno-capitalism, but it really is kind of that. It's like everything's a bit of a performance, and one can help that this is another expression of vertical integration, because that's exactly what it is. But
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why every company wants a podcast now
To circle back to your specific question about these tech people, these VCs, this particular style of B2B podcast, yeah, there's always going to be a lane. I think there is a very specific class of producer and a class of consumer. And within that space, I think there's still quite a bit of potential, sure.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why every company wants a podcast now
Yeah, you know, if you're hawking crypto, you can do that at a lot of different venues. But I mean, flip it around. If we're not thinking about this just through the lens of the platform, podcasting in this case, And in 2024, an appropriate medium game plan for any creator, for any artist, for any person who wants to reach people is to be platform agnostic to some extent, right?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why every company wants a podcast now
And to some extent, this is an expression of that. I can talk about how good my investment strategy is over Twitter or Blue Sky or whatever, but you want to go to where people are and you also want to go to and build out spaces where you can have a deep, loyal following if you're thinking about it, right?
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why every company wants a podcast now
You've got to have many spaces that you can attract people and you've got to be where people are.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why every company wants a podcast now
I can't speak for what happens in the hearts and souls of other people, but there is a very contained, specific lane here. I think about it in three layers. We're speaking in December 2024. The first layer is the fact that the first mover advantage, it's over. In the same way that if you started a sub stack now, God knows if your sub stack is going to be big.
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Why every company wants a podcast now
There's always a benefit to being first to a medium that's kind of buzzy or first to a platform that's kind of buzzy that's going up. And the other layer of podcasting, the layer I think about is that podcasting is just an expression of the internet. It's hard to launch a new podcast not the same way it's hard to launch a new website now. There's just so much territory claimed.