February 27, 2025 • 24 mins
New York Times best-selling author and podcaster Malcolm Gladwell sits down with the CEO of iHeartMedia Digital, Conal Byrne to discuss the power of narrative audio storytelling and its ability to move listeners emotionally, build brands, and change the way we all see the world.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:12):
Hello, Hello, Hello, Welcome everybody to what I hope is
going to be a pretty good conversation.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
Hope, so I set the bar low.
Speaker 1 (00:25):
Listen. We came into business together several years ago, and
we met each other through audio. In the United States.
Audio is, i think even still today, a vastly understated,
undervalued channel. You have a third of all media consumption
(00:46):
is audio is not sight, sound and motion is just sound.
And when you think about that in your own life
and think through your day and the content that you consume,
it sort of trus up with your own experience. No
doubt you have a deep love for audio. I've heard
you say things over the years like I may never
write a book the same way I may always think
(01:08):
about storytelling in terms of how would this work through
an audio channel, through particularly a podcast. Just talk about
that a little bit. It's not necessarily a normal deep
love that all creators have for this kind of a medium.
Where did that come from?
Speaker 2 (01:23):
Well, when I started doing my podcast, my assumption was
that what a podcast was was simply a spoken article,
And after doing about two episodes of Revision's history, I
realized that was completely wrong and that there were a
number of really significant differences. The principal one is how
(01:47):
emotional audio is. And I always come back to this,
but it's a point that cannot be made enough. If
I am trying to make you If my goal is
to make you cry, and I say I'm going to
try and make you cry by something that you read,
I'm gonna write an article and see if you cry.
The job of making you cry is incredibly difficult. It's really,
(02:10):
really really hard to make someone cry under any circumstances,
but just by reading something. But if you told me
that I could play you five minutes of something, two
minutes of something, and could I make you cry the
answers I absolutely could. And once you understand that tears
are a really sadness, grief, all those things are profound emotions.
(02:33):
The idea that I have access to that depth of
emotion with my voice in a way that I don't
with your eyes is really really profound.
Speaker 1 (02:45):
It's interesting too, because you would think if you have
this entire toolbox of the senses, it would get easier. Yeah,
But actually with audio, when you strip away some of these.
Speaker 2 (02:56):
Fool away I was saying this this morning at the
masterclass that one of the findings of research into deception
is that if I can see someone who is deceiving me,
I have a harder time knowing whether I'm deceived than
if I simply hear their voice. In other words, something
(03:18):
about stripping away the image of somebody and forcing me
just to focus on the sound of their voice enables
some or reaches a part of me that is more
profound and more perceptive than when I get the full information.
(03:40):
That's a beautiful sort of metaphor for why it is
that oral storytelling has such a hold on us that
we're really processing it in a very different place than
we do with the things that we read or the
things that we see with our eyes.
Speaker 1 (03:56):
If you will, I want to get into a little
bit your creative process, because I think it's genuinely one
of the more fascinating creators at work today. Not just
because of the stuff that you write, and it's great
books and you revisit those works and that process is interesting,
but just the selection of topics that you decide on.
(04:18):
When we were taking stage, Will Smith stops you and says,
I love what you did with the story of David.
You've written about golf courses, you've covered the war medals,
I mean it ranges. So let me start here. What
does it take for a topic or a subject matter
to become to catch Malcolm Gladwell's attention? What does it
(04:41):
take for you to say, ah, that might be something
I spent a little time with.
Speaker 2 (04:45):
Well, it has to be something that it can't just
appeal to me. It has to be an idea that
takes the audience somewhere. It takes the audience on some
kind of journey. So in the simplest people who are
not creators of stories and will sometimes say you should
(05:08):
really write about X, and what they give you is
a topic. And what they don't understand is the difference
between a topic and a story, And there's a huge difference.
A topic is a static area field of inquiry. A
story is a place that starts here and ends over here.
So my first question when I consider something is what
(05:29):
is the journey that I can take the listener on.
If they're going to start here, where they going to
end up? Can they end up somewhere differently? And as
long as I think they can end up somewhere differently,
I'm happy to do the story. That's really the only
the reason why we cover on revision's history such a
wide range of topics is that the only thing I'm
(05:50):
interested in is whether there's movement on the part of
the of the listener.
Speaker 1 (05:58):
One topic you hit recently that I want to drill
into a little bit is something that caught your eye
enough to write a lot about, and it's this idea
of the overstory. When you were visited the tipping Point,
this awesome book, you wrote one of the things that
came to the forefront, and you wrote about a lot,
and the new sort of revisitation of that was, was
(06:20):
this idea of the overstory, this thing that sort of
you do it better than me, but sort of inexplicably
comes out of nowhere and suddenly is a thing like
manifests itself that's hard to trace back to an origin.
It's hard to know why is this here? Now? Why
are we all doing this thing? Talk about why? First
of all, why that caught your eye, and then just
(06:41):
about the concept of the overstory itself is deeply fascinating.
Speaker 2 (06:45):
Yeah, I mean, I was trying to there are a
series of things that have always fascinated me. So for
the longest time I was obsessed with Germany, and I
would go to Germany at least once or twice a year,
spend all kinds of time there. And the thing I
could would always strike me when I went to Germany
was the minute you're in Germany, you really realize you're
(07:08):
in Germany, right, It couldn't be anywhere else, And there
was some quality of Germanness that infused almost everything about
your experience there. My question was, where does that come from?
Like what is that? What is it? Why is it
that it feels differently to sit in a cafe in
Berlin than it does to sit in a cafe or
(07:28):
Paris or New York City or here in Doha.
Speaker 1 (07:32):
Right.
Speaker 2 (07:33):
And then also I would I was always puzzled for years.
I would puzzle when I would hear parents talk about
schools and they would say that's a great school or
that's a terrible school. And I would always say, what
are you talking about? Like what is it about the
school that you're fastening on that allows you to reach
this conclusion? And I, for the longest time I dismissed
this is both of these are just superstitions. But then
(07:56):
I realized know that there is something real and significant
that distinguishes one place from another. That has to do
with the kind of common stories that people in a
given community or area or a country tell each other.
That those stories are really, really, really important. You know,
(08:19):
my familys have Jamaican Jamaicans tell an incredibly powerful story
about each other. Jamaicans think of themselves as the most gifted, remarkable,
extraordinary people on the face of the earth. There's only
a couple of billion of them, but their level of
self regard is.
Speaker 1 (08:35):
To the roof.
Speaker 2 (08:36):
Right, That's about a story they tell each other, and
they have been tell each other for generations. And when
Jamaicans moved to other parts of the world, they tend
to do really really well. Right, Why because they're just
full of self confidence that they've imported from their home country.
That's the kind of that's an overstory. That's what I'm
talking about, is these you know, I grew up in Canada.
Canada is a very different overstory that's about modesty and
(08:59):
humility and you know, and joining hands with your neighbor
and being polite. And these are significant and understanding what
an overstory is in a given community is crucial to
understanding it.
Speaker 1 (09:12):
I believe my parents are from Ireland that came to
the United States in the sixties, and they definitely would
take issue with Jamaican's thinking they're the best storytellers. But
you raised this issue of like your background, your context,
where you come from, a Jamaican with Jamaican heritage, kid
(09:34):
growing up in Canada. How does that swirl together into
you today?
Speaker 2 (09:40):
Well, the great benefit of being from being a part
of many different cultures is that I think it just
gives you more perspectives. You know that one of the
greatest prompts for a storyteller is what you notice, right,
what strikes you as being strange or inexplicable or fascinating.
And I think the more kind of diversity there is
(10:04):
in your own background, the more things strike you as weird.
Speaker 1 (10:08):
Right.
Speaker 2 (10:09):
There are fewer things that are familiar or so. There
are lots of things about America that as a non American,
I feel I see more easily than Americans do because
it's very It's so familiar to them, It's not familiar
to me. Even so I've lived there for many years.
I ya think, what on earth?
Speaker 1 (10:27):
Like?
Speaker 2 (10:27):
What has happened?
Speaker 1 (10:28):
Like?
Speaker 2 (10:28):
You know, I'm constantly as I go through the world
asking myself. I have no idea what's going on here,
And that's the principle prompt for a lot of the
stories that I tell.
Speaker 1 (10:39):
Yeah, it's fascinating. Actually, when I think of a lot
of the lessons my mother taught me, the most consistent
one was just pay attention. Yeah, pay attention. And I
think you're right to a certain extent. So much story
comes out of paying a little bit more attention than
the next guy. I think some of though, some of
(10:59):
what you do so remarkably well and really differently than
other folks is not just the selection of story, but
how you approach it. So that's the other side of it,
is when do you crack this nut in the process
where you're like, that's how I'm going to talk about that,
that's my way in. Is that a whole thing as well? Well?
Speaker 2 (11:20):
A lot of that has to do with particularly now.
So one of the kind of this is a very
interesting alteration that I found recently with the dawn of
kind of the digital age, which is that research in
the digital age has gotten so easy. It's so easy
(11:41):
to discover information that storytellers or reporters or journalists as
a result, have become it's easier to get to be lazy, right,
And so I was. I did two episodes of my
podcast last season about a court case, a really really,
really deeply fascinating court case on a topic that was
(12:04):
subject that was, you know, big in the news, and
as before, when I was starting out getting kind of
interested in it, I went and did a search about
what other journalists had said about the court case, and
I realized that no one who had written about this
court case had either attended the trial or read the
(12:25):
trial transcripts. No one I found out a single bit
of evidence that anyone had done anything more than a
kind of incredibly superficial read. And it is astonishing to
me how often this is the case. That the fact
that you can you could google the press conference after
the verdict was revealed, and you could write up a
(12:46):
quick little subsummary of it that allowed you to talk
about it with your friends and do a little article
that was enough, right and in fact, and the court
transcripts were several thousand pages, and if you read them
in their entire you realize the story. There was a
story embedded in that trial that was fascinating and has
been completely ignored. So like a lot of it is
(13:09):
simply I have kind of the confidence now that if
you're willing to take the time to explore something in depth,
you will find something that no one is talking about
because there's a level of rigor that's that has that
is increasingly missing from a lot of journalistic inquiry.
Speaker 1 (13:26):
And so counterintuitively has digital media made that worse?
Speaker 2 (13:31):
Yeah, way worse because you have so much information now
at a drop of a hat that it's impossible for
you to absorb it. Right, So, uh, you know, you
could have you know, chat GPT summarized the court case
for you, but the problem the summary would be accurate.
But the problem with the summary is it leaves out
all the details, and the story is in the details.
Speaker 1 (13:54):
Right.
Speaker 2 (13:55):
That's if you think about what does it mean to
be a When you call someone a great storyteller, what
are they doing that distinguishes them from someone who is
an average storyteller. It's not about their grasp of grand themes.
The themes are the first and easiest thing, right, It's
about the specificity of the story they're telling you, right
(14:17):
that their memory of specific details, the way someone looked,
the you know, what they were doing with their hands,
the car they were driving, all those kinds of things.
That's what trans and if all you're if all you're
doing is skimming along the surface, there's no specificity to
the to the story. I used to love I once
did a I used to do lots of interviews for
(14:39):
our podcast Broken Record with songwriters, and the lovely thing
about getting a gifted musician to discuss their music in
depth is that you understand the degree of specificity that's
involved in writing a great song.
Speaker 1 (14:57):
Right.
Speaker 2 (14:58):
How when you to do a songwriter talk about how
they spend you know, three weeks working on one line
getting it just exactly right, right right, And that's because
they understand if you have, if you have three minutes
to tell a story on a pop song that you
hope will last someone for the rest of their life.
Yeah right, The choice of words in that song.
Speaker 1 (15:20):
Are absolutely essential, mission essential.
Speaker 2 (15:22):
That's that's what separates a great songwriter from a lousy one,
is their attention to that kind of detail. And the
same is true. I think of storytelling as a whole.
Speaker 1 (15:33):
So I think the concise art of a great two
and a half to three and a half minute pop
song is similar to maybe your why your love of
advertising exists? And I don't want to lead the witness.
But I think we've talked about this a lot. Where
we have the We have the just great job being
(15:55):
able to work with a lot of creators at iHeartMedia,
thousands of podcasts we distribute them. It's a huge part
of our business. They don't all react the same to advertising.
It's not that creators are allergic to it or lean
into it. It's just it's very inconsistent. You are, I think,
very genuinely way over here on the side of I
(16:16):
really am into advertising. I'm into brands, branding, the story
of brands.
Speaker 2 (16:23):
Yeah, you do an.
Speaker 1 (16:24):
Incredible series with us and IBM called smart Talks, which
is honestly some of the best content we've made. Where
does that come from? Why that love?
Speaker 2 (16:36):
Well? I wanted to go into advertising when I came
out of college. That was my first choice. But the
deeper reason is that I love the constraint. I think
that if I can tell a story in sixty seconds
or ninety seconds, then and I can tell it to
(16:56):
it successfully in that time, then that is an extraordinary
creative achievement. So I did for I did these spots
for BMW which ran on our podcast, and I'm inordinately
pleased with proud of them, and they're the show. We
(17:16):
had ninety seconds, and the question was, can I tell
a compelling I happened to personally love BMW's I'm a
huge car guy. Can I tell a story about that
brand that captures something elemental in it in ninety seconds?
And the approach was I went to people who I
knew had at some point had encounters with BMWs in
(17:38):
your life, and I had them telling me the story
of your first BMW. And the stories are fantastic, but
they're all about specificity.
Speaker 1 (17:45):
Right.
Speaker 2 (17:46):
There was one that I loved about a guy who
had a his first beautiful car he ever owned was
at nineteen seventy four BMW two thousand and two, and
he drove He would drive his youngest daughter into two
in the back of the car when she was two
years old, and he would she wouldn't put on a
seatbelt because it was only a short drive, right, and
(18:07):
she would always take off her clothes. Right as he's
driving this gorgeous pan into town and they get stopped
by a police officer and the police officer is just
furious with him, and he goes, you know, first of all,
to drive with your we had a seatbelt, and your
daughter is just the height of your responsibility and for
her to be naked, and the guy who's just appalled,
and then he looks at long and hard of the
(18:29):
car and he says, but I'm not going to give
you a ticket, and he pauses again, he goes, man,
that's a nice part. That's a great story that tells you.
That story takes into telling a minute and a half
and in it, what do you learn. You learned that
there was something about that automobile that touched not just
(18:50):
the guy telling the story, but the cop who stops it, right,
and he communicates, Wow, this is a car that excites
that that that you know, that holds that string right,
that is that's a real story, and everything that's powerful
about that grows out of the details. Yeah, right, that's
to my mind, I was as proud of I didn't
(19:12):
even tell the story. I just recorded it and edited
a little slightly, But I was as proud of that
as almost anything I've ever done.
Speaker 1 (19:19):
That's a super beautiful car too.
Speaker 2 (19:21):
Oh my god, such you guys got so.
Speaker 1 (19:24):
In some of the work that we've done together, we've
had we've been grateful to be able to work with
you as a creator. But sticking with advertising for a second,
we came to you about a year ago, a year
and a half ago, and this is pretty interesting. We
had a belief at IHART that there was a disconnect
(19:45):
in the advertising world in the United States, maybe beyond
that the people who controlled the reins of marketing, that
who spent advertising dollars were not connected with the consumers
that they were trying to tell stories to. Our feeling
was that there was a disconnect. We felt this because
we reach nine out of ten American adults and yet
(20:08):
and still audio is underspent in marketing. And something didn't
catch for us as to why this seemed to grab
your interest to and we ran some research around it.
We interviewed a lot of people and asked a lot
of questions, and this sort of amazing statistic came back
from that research that there was this huge amount of
(20:31):
the United States of average American consumers who felt totally overlooked, ignored,
disconnected from media, marketing and media. Forty four percent of
the United States felt like most of the content that's made,
most of the marketing that is on that content is
(20:51):
not for me. This huge rift, how did that hit
your radar when we learned this together, I remember, But like,
how do you process that? And why do you think
that's happening?
Speaker 2 (21:03):
Well, I mean and thin there's there's some obvious examples
or reasons, and that is the the worlds of the
people who make advertising and the people who consume it
are diverging. I mean, that would be one in the
same way that by the way that professional worlds in
many areas are increasingly diverging from non professional worlds. That
(21:23):
sort of symptom number one. And I think that's always
in some sense that has always gone on. But what
happens is we have these periodic corrections where you know,
the profession realizes it is out of touch and is
forced to kind of recalibrate and rethink what it's doing.
And I mean, you might you could you could argue
(21:44):
that the rise, for example, of influencers in social media
is a response to exactly what you're saying. That there
was a big hole, in a big disconnect that in
between the kind of message that were being created and
the audience, and so into that vacuum, wrote the influencer
(22:04):
who said, I can speak more in a more authentic
manner to the people who are actually consuming products. If
advertising had been doing it, world had been doing its
job and it remain connected, there wouldn't be this enormous
role thing for influencers.
Speaker 1 (22:20):
So I'll end on this. I mean, we're at one
of the premiere tech conferences in the world, and we
are at the sort of precipice, maybe in the middle
of already just this new wave of technology that is
hitting content and content creators of course, AI and multiple
other tools hitting radars. Do you feel sort of and
(22:44):
maybe both? Do you feel hopeful or do you feel
like I'm not sure how this is going to go
for the next five or ten years, and it's going
to redefine what it means to create, let alone what
I do every day. How do you approach the next
chapter of this stuff?
Speaker 2 (23:00):
I don't know. I mean, that's an incredibly important question,
and you've asked me that question with nine seconds the block.
But I will say this that the thing that has
always made advertising and marketing and storytelling powerful is it
fills the basic human need to be part of community.
(23:25):
Right that it is not enough simply be told a story.
We want to be told a story. We want to
be part of a group that is being told a
story that's power of the power of the story. That's
the reason we go to concerts with sixty thousand other people.
It's why we go to football matches with one hundred
(23:45):
thousand people. It's why all of those kinds of things.
And my worry with a lot of new technologies is
that they are separating the community from the individual. And
I feel like the pendulum has to in the other
direction if we're going to maintain the power of uh of,
(24:05):
of of, of narratives and storytelling.
Speaker 1 (24:08):
As always, I learn a ton when I get to
talk to you, and I really do appreciate you coming
to Doha and being part of Web Summit. Thank you
so much, my pleasure. Thank you everybody.
Speaker 2 (24:17):
Thank you.
Hello, Hello, Hello, Welcome everybody to what I hope is
going to be a pretty good conversation.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
Hope, so I set the bar low.
Speaker 1 (00:25):
Listen. We came into business together several years ago, and
we met each other through audio. In the United States.
Audio is, i think even still today, a vastly understated,
undervalued channel. You have a third of all media consumption
(00:46):
is audio is not sight, sound and motion is just sound.
And when you think about that in your own life
and think through your day and the content that you consume,
it sort of trus up with your own experience. No
doubt you have a deep love for audio. I've heard
you say things over the years like I may never
write a book the same way I may always think
(01:08):
about storytelling in terms of how would this work through
an audio channel, through particularly a podcast. Just talk about
that a little bit. It's not necessarily a normal deep
love that all creators have for this kind of a medium.
Where did that come from?
Speaker 2 (01:23):
Well, when I started doing my podcast, my assumption was
that what a podcast was was simply a spoken article,
And after doing about two episodes of Revision's history, I
realized that was completely wrong and that there were a
number of really significant differences. The principal one is how
(01:47):
emotional audio is. And I always come back to this,
but it's a point that cannot be made enough. If
I am trying to make you If my goal is
to make you cry, and I say I'm going to
try and make you cry by something that you read,
I'm gonna write an article and see if you cry.
The job of making you cry is incredibly difficult. It's really,
(02:10):
really really hard to make someone cry under any circumstances,
but just by reading something. But if you told me
that I could play you five minutes of something, two
minutes of something, and could I make you cry the
answers I absolutely could. And once you understand that tears
are a really sadness, grief, all those things are profound emotions.
(02:33):
The idea that I have access to that depth of
emotion with my voice in a way that I don't
with your eyes is really really profound.
Speaker 1 (02:45):
It's interesting too, because you would think if you have
this entire toolbox of the senses, it would get easier. Yeah,
But actually with audio, when you strip away some of these.
Speaker 2 (02:56):
Fool away I was saying this this morning at the
masterclass that one of the findings of research into deception
is that if I can see someone who is deceiving me,
I have a harder time knowing whether I'm deceived than
if I simply hear their voice. In other words, something
(03:18):
about stripping away the image of somebody and forcing me
just to focus on the sound of their voice enables
some or reaches a part of me that is more
profound and more perceptive than when I get the full information.
(03:40):
That's a beautiful sort of metaphor for why it is
that oral storytelling has such a hold on us that
we're really processing it in a very different place than
we do with the things that we read or the
things that we see with our eyes.
Speaker 1 (03:56):
If you will, I want to get into a little
bit your creative process, because I think it's genuinely one
of the more fascinating creators at work today. Not just
because of the stuff that you write, and it's great
books and you revisit those works and that process is interesting,
but just the selection of topics that you decide on.
(04:18):
When we were taking stage, Will Smith stops you and says,
I love what you did with the story of David.
You've written about golf courses, you've covered the war medals,
I mean it ranges. So let me start here. What
does it take for a topic or a subject matter
to become to catch Malcolm Gladwell's attention? What does it
(04:41):
take for you to say, ah, that might be something
I spent a little time with.
Speaker 2 (04:45):
Well, it has to be something that it can't just
appeal to me. It has to be an idea that
takes the audience somewhere. It takes the audience on some
kind of journey. So in the simplest people who are
not creators of stories and will sometimes say you should
(05:08):
really write about X, and what they give you is
a topic. And what they don't understand is the difference
between a topic and a story, And there's a huge difference.
A topic is a static area field of inquiry. A
story is a place that starts here and ends over here.
So my first question when I consider something is what
(05:29):
is the journey that I can take the listener on.
If they're going to start here, where they going to
end up? Can they end up somewhere differently? And as
long as I think they can end up somewhere differently,
I'm happy to do the story. That's really the only
the reason why we cover on revision's history such a
wide range of topics is that the only thing I'm
(05:50):
interested in is whether there's movement on the part of
the of the listener.
Speaker 1 (05:58):
One topic you hit recently that I want to drill
into a little bit is something that caught your eye
enough to write a lot about, and it's this idea
of the overstory. When you were visited the tipping Point,
this awesome book, you wrote one of the things that
came to the forefront, and you wrote about a lot,
and the new sort of revisitation of that was, was
(06:20):
this idea of the overstory, this thing that sort of
you do it better than me, but sort of inexplicably
comes out of nowhere and suddenly is a thing like
manifests itself that's hard to trace back to an origin.
It's hard to know why is this here? Now? Why
are we all doing this thing? Talk about why? First
of all, why that caught your eye, and then just
(06:41):
about the concept of the overstory itself is deeply fascinating.
Speaker 2 (06:45):
Yeah, I mean, I was trying to there are a
series of things that have always fascinated me. So for
the longest time I was obsessed with Germany, and I
would go to Germany at least once or twice a year,
spend all kinds of time there. And the thing I
could would always strike me when I went to Germany
was the minute you're in Germany, you really realize you're
(07:08):
in Germany, right, It couldn't be anywhere else, And there
was some quality of Germanness that infused almost everything about
your experience there. My question was, where does that come from?
Like what is that? What is it? Why is it
that it feels differently to sit in a cafe in
Berlin than it does to sit in a cafe or
(07:28):
Paris or New York City or here in Doha.
Speaker 1 (07:32):
Right.
Speaker 2 (07:33):
And then also I would I was always puzzled for years.
I would puzzle when I would hear parents talk about
schools and they would say that's a great school or
that's a terrible school. And I would always say, what
are you talking about? Like what is it about the
school that you're fastening on that allows you to reach
this conclusion? And I, for the longest time I dismissed
this is both of these are just superstitions. But then
(07:56):
I realized know that there is something real and significant
that distinguishes one place from another. That has to do
with the kind of common stories that people in a
given community or area or a country tell each other.
That those stories are really, really, really important. You know,
(08:19):
my familys have Jamaican Jamaicans tell an incredibly powerful story
about each other. Jamaicans think of themselves as the most gifted, remarkable,
extraordinary people on the face of the earth. There's only
a couple of billion of them, but their level of
self regard is.
Speaker 1 (08:35):
To the roof.
Speaker 2 (08:36):
Right, That's about a story they tell each other, and
they have been tell each other for generations. And when
Jamaicans moved to other parts of the world, they tend
to do really really well. Right, Why because they're just
full of self confidence that they've imported from their home country.
That's the kind of that's an overstory. That's what I'm
talking about, is these you know, I grew up in Canada.
Canada is a very different overstory that's about modesty and
(08:59):
humility and you know, and joining hands with your neighbor
and being polite. And these are significant and understanding what
an overstory is in a given community is crucial to
understanding it.
Speaker 1 (09:12):
I believe my parents are from Ireland that came to
the United States in the sixties, and they definitely would
take issue with Jamaican's thinking they're the best storytellers. But
you raised this issue of like your background, your context,
where you come from, a Jamaican with Jamaican heritage, kid
(09:34):
growing up in Canada. How does that swirl together into
you today?
Speaker 2 (09:40):
Well, the great benefit of being from being a part
of many different cultures is that I think it just
gives you more perspectives. You know that one of the
greatest prompts for a storyteller is what you notice, right,
what strikes you as being strange or inexplicable or fascinating.
And I think the more kind of diversity there is
(10:04):
in your own background, the more things strike you as weird.
Speaker 1 (10:08):
Right.
Speaker 2 (10:09):
There are fewer things that are familiar or so. There
are lots of things about America that as a non American,
I feel I see more easily than Americans do because
it's very It's so familiar to them, It's not familiar
to me. Even so I've lived there for many years.
I ya think, what on earth?
Speaker 1 (10:27):
Like?
Speaker 2 (10:27):
What has happened?
Speaker 1 (10:28):
Like?
Speaker 2 (10:28):
You know, I'm constantly as I go through the world
asking myself. I have no idea what's going on here,
And that's the principle prompt for a lot of the
stories that I tell.
Speaker 1 (10:39):
Yeah, it's fascinating. Actually, when I think of a lot
of the lessons my mother taught me, the most consistent
one was just pay attention. Yeah, pay attention. And I
think you're right to a certain extent. So much story
comes out of paying a little bit more attention than
the next guy. I think some of though, some of
(10:59):
what you do so remarkably well and really differently than
other folks is not just the selection of story, but
how you approach it. So that's the other side of it,
is when do you crack this nut in the process
where you're like, that's how I'm going to talk about that,
that's my way in. Is that a whole thing as well? Well?
Speaker 2 (11:20):
A lot of that has to do with particularly now.
So one of the kind of this is a very
interesting alteration that I found recently with the dawn of
kind of the digital age, which is that research in
the digital age has gotten so easy. It's so easy
(11:41):
to discover information that storytellers or reporters or journalists as
a result, have become it's easier to get to be lazy, right,
And so I was. I did two episodes of my
podcast last season about a court case, a really really,
really deeply fascinating court case on a topic that was
(12:04):
subject that was, you know, big in the news, and
as before, when I was starting out getting kind of
interested in it, I went and did a search about
what other journalists had said about the court case, and
I realized that no one who had written about this
court case had either attended the trial or read the
(12:25):
trial transcripts. No one I found out a single bit
of evidence that anyone had done anything more than a
kind of incredibly superficial read. And it is astonishing to
me how often this is the case. That the fact
that you can you could google the press conference after
the verdict was revealed, and you could write up a
(12:46):
quick little subsummary of it that allowed you to talk
about it with your friends and do a little article
that was enough, right and in fact, and the court
transcripts were several thousand pages, and if you read them
in their entire you realize the story. There was a
story embedded in that trial that was fascinating and has
been completely ignored. So like a lot of it is
(13:09):
simply I have kind of the confidence now that if
you're willing to take the time to explore something in depth,
you will find something that no one is talking about
because there's a level of rigor that's that has that
is increasingly missing from a lot of journalistic inquiry.
Speaker 1 (13:26):
And so counterintuitively has digital media made that worse?
Speaker 2 (13:31):
Yeah, way worse because you have so much information now
at a drop of a hat that it's impossible for
you to absorb it. Right, So, uh, you know, you
could have you know, chat GPT summarized the court case
for you, but the problem the summary would be accurate.
But the problem with the summary is it leaves out
all the details, and the story is in the details.
Speaker 1 (13:54):
Right.
Speaker 2 (13:55):
That's if you think about what does it mean to
be a When you call someone a great storyteller, what
are they doing that distinguishes them from someone who is
an average storyteller. It's not about their grasp of grand themes.
The themes are the first and easiest thing, right, It's
about the specificity of the story they're telling you, right
(14:17):
that their memory of specific details, the way someone looked,
the you know, what they were doing with their hands,
the car they were driving, all those kinds of things.
That's what trans and if all you're if all you're
doing is skimming along the surface, there's no specificity to
the to the story. I used to love I once
did a I used to do lots of interviews for
(14:39):
our podcast Broken Record with songwriters, and the lovely thing
about getting a gifted musician to discuss their music in
depth is that you understand the degree of specificity that's
involved in writing a great song.
Speaker 1 (14:57):
Right.
Speaker 2 (14:58):
How when you to do a songwriter talk about how
they spend you know, three weeks working on one line
getting it just exactly right, right right, And that's because
they understand if you have, if you have three minutes
to tell a story on a pop song that you
hope will last someone for the rest of their life.
Yeah right, The choice of words in that song.
Speaker 1 (15:20):
Are absolutely essential, mission essential.
Speaker 2 (15:22):
That's that's what separates a great songwriter from a lousy one,
is their attention to that kind of detail. And the
same is true. I think of storytelling as a whole.
Speaker 1 (15:33):
So I think the concise art of a great two
and a half to three and a half minute pop
song is similar to maybe your why your love of
advertising exists? And I don't want to lead the witness.
But I think we've talked about this a lot. Where
we have the We have the just great job being
(15:55):
able to work with a lot of creators at iHeartMedia,
thousands of podcasts we distribute them. It's a huge part
of our business. They don't all react the same to advertising.
It's not that creators are allergic to it or lean
into it. It's just it's very inconsistent. You are, I think,
very genuinely way over here on the side of I
(16:16):
really am into advertising. I'm into brands, branding, the story
of brands.
Speaker 2 (16:23):
Yeah, you do an.
Speaker 1 (16:24):
Incredible series with us and IBM called smart Talks, which
is honestly some of the best content we've made. Where
does that come from? Why that love?
Speaker 2 (16:36):
Well? I wanted to go into advertising when I came
out of college. That was my first choice. But the
deeper reason is that I love the constraint. I think
that if I can tell a story in sixty seconds
or ninety seconds, then and I can tell it to
(16:56):
it successfully in that time, then that is an extraordinary
creative achievement. So I did for I did these spots
for BMW which ran on our podcast, and I'm inordinately
pleased with proud of them, and they're the show. We
(17:16):
had ninety seconds, and the question was, can I tell
a compelling I happened to personally love BMW's I'm a
huge car guy. Can I tell a story about that
brand that captures something elemental in it in ninety seconds?
And the approach was I went to people who I
knew had at some point had encounters with BMWs in
(17:38):
your life, and I had them telling me the story
of your first BMW. And the stories are fantastic, but
they're all about specificity.
Speaker 1 (17:45):
Right.
Speaker 2 (17:46):
There was one that I loved about a guy who
had a his first beautiful car he ever owned was
at nineteen seventy four BMW two thousand and two, and
he drove He would drive his youngest daughter into two
in the back of the car when she was two
years old, and he would she wouldn't put on a
seatbelt because it was only a short drive, right, and
(18:07):
she would always take off her clothes. Right as he's
driving this gorgeous pan into town and they get stopped
by a police officer and the police officer is just
furious with him, and he goes, you know, first of all,
to drive with your we had a seatbelt, and your
daughter is just the height of your responsibility and for
her to be naked, and the guy who's just appalled,
and then he looks at long and hard of the
(18:29):
car and he says, but I'm not going to give
you a ticket, and he pauses again, he goes, man,
that's a nice part. That's a great story that tells you.
That story takes into telling a minute and a half
and in it, what do you learn. You learned that
there was something about that automobile that touched not just
(18:50):
the guy telling the story, but the cop who stops it, right,
and he communicates, Wow, this is a car that excites
that that that you know, that holds that string right,
that is that's a real story, and everything that's powerful
about that grows out of the details. Yeah, right, that's
to my mind, I was as proud of I didn't
(19:12):
even tell the story. I just recorded it and edited
a little slightly, But I was as proud of that
as almost anything I've ever done.
Speaker 1 (19:19):
That's a super beautiful car too.
Speaker 2 (19:21):
Oh my god, such you guys got so.
Speaker 1 (19:24):
In some of the work that we've done together, we've
had we've been grateful to be able to work with
you as a creator. But sticking with advertising for a second,
we came to you about a year ago, a year
and a half ago, and this is pretty interesting. We
had a belief at IHART that there was a disconnect
(19:45):
in the advertising world in the United States, maybe beyond
that the people who controlled the reins of marketing, that
who spent advertising dollars were not connected with the consumers
that they were trying to tell stories to. Our feeling
was that there was a disconnect. We felt this because
we reach nine out of ten American adults and yet
(20:08):
and still audio is underspent in marketing. And something didn't
catch for us as to why this seemed to grab
your interest to and we ran some research around it.
We interviewed a lot of people and asked a lot
of questions, and this sort of amazing statistic came back
from that research that there was this huge amount of
(20:31):
the United States of average American consumers who felt totally overlooked, ignored,
disconnected from media, marketing and media. Forty four percent of
the United States felt like most of the content that's made,
most of the marketing that is on that content is
(20:51):
not for me. This huge rift, how did that hit
your radar when we learned this together, I remember, But like,
how do you process that? And why do you think
that's happening?
Speaker 2 (21:03):
Well, I mean and thin there's there's some obvious examples
or reasons, and that is the the worlds of the
people who make advertising and the people who consume it
are diverging. I mean, that would be one in the
same way that by the way that professional worlds in
many areas are increasingly diverging from non professional worlds. That
(21:23):
sort of symptom number one. And I think that's always
in some sense that has always gone on. But what
happens is we have these periodic corrections where you know,
the profession realizes it is out of touch and is
forced to kind of recalibrate and rethink what it's doing.
And I mean, you might you could you could argue
(21:44):
that the rise, for example, of influencers in social media
is a response to exactly what you're saying. That there
was a big hole, in a big disconnect that in
between the kind of message that were being created and
the audience, and so into that vacuum, wrote the influencer
(22:04):
who said, I can speak more in a more authentic
manner to the people who are actually consuming products. If
advertising had been doing it, world had been doing its
job and it remain connected, there wouldn't be this enormous
role thing for influencers.
Speaker 1 (22:20):
So I'll end on this. I mean, we're at one
of the premiere tech conferences in the world, and we
are at the sort of precipice, maybe in the middle
of already just this new wave of technology that is
hitting content and content creators of course, AI and multiple
other tools hitting radars. Do you feel sort of and
(22:44):
maybe both? Do you feel hopeful or do you feel
like I'm not sure how this is going to go
for the next five or ten years, and it's going
to redefine what it means to create, let alone what
I do every day. How do you approach the next
chapter of this stuff?
Speaker 2 (23:00):
I don't know. I mean, that's an incredibly important question,
and you've asked me that question with nine seconds the block.
But I will say this that the thing that has
always made advertising and marketing and storytelling powerful is it
fills the basic human need to be part of community.
(23:25):
Right that it is not enough simply be told a story.
We want to be told a story. We want to
be part of a group that is being told a
story that's power of the power of the story. That's
the reason we go to concerts with sixty thousand other people.
It's why we go to football matches with one hundred
(23:45):
thousand people. It's why all of those kinds of things.
And my worry with a lot of new technologies is
that they are separating the community from the individual. And
I feel like the pendulum has to in the other
direction if we're going to maintain the power of uh of,
(24:05):
of of, of narratives and storytelling.
Speaker 1 (24:08):
As always, I learn a ton when I get to
talk to you, and I really do appreciate you coming
to Doha and being part of Web Summit. Thank you
so much, my pleasure. Thank you everybody.
Speaker 2 (24:17):
Thank you.
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