What are long-shot presidential candidates talking about on podcasts?
30:01 Share

Welcome to the Most Innovative Companies podcast, where we break down the biggest stories in the world of business and the innovations you need to know about. I'm your host, Yasmin Gagné, joined by my producer, Ed McMahon. Just kidding. Josh Christensen. Hey, Josh. Yes, sir. You are correct. That's my Ed McMahon impression. I'm going to spare the audience that. This is a reference that no one under the age of 65 gets. I didn't know the reference.

You could literally put on any voice and I'd be like, wow, that's so great. That's a great Ed McMahon voice. What's a more modern reference to this? Who's Jimmy Fallon's like co-sidekick or something like that? I think maybe we need to think of this more as like a hype man situation. Like if I'm Eminem. So I'm Flav for Flav? Exactly. Exactly.

Okay. Anyway. Anyway. Before the show, any housekeeping? Oh, yeah. Of course we have some housekeeping because Fast Company is always doing amazing stuff. So the biggest thing I want to tell our audience about is that Fast Company's Queer 50 list, it's the fourth annual Queer 50 list, will be announced on June 13th on FastCompany.com. So go there. There.

This is the fourth annual list of LGBTQ women and non-binary folks and innovators in business and tech. It's a really great package. We'll also be featuring an interview on this show with one of the honorees. We won't spoil that list before it comes out, but also on our other podcasts as well. You'll hear more features and be able to hear from these amazing women and non-binary folks making change in their industry. And also,

Also, I want to remind everyone again that if you haven't subscribed to the MIC podcast, which if you're listening to this, I mean, come on, just hit that follow button already. It's not that hard. Not that hard. It's right up there in the corner. What do the kids say? Smash that subscribe button.

It's more of a YouTube thing. And also go to Fast Company across all the social platforms if you want to see our faces with some little short form videos. And you can see my beautiful new background. I just moved, Yaz, so I have a new back.

That's why you have the keyboard. Josh is going to sing for us in an upcoming episode. Reason enough to subscribe, but he's already promised me that that's coming. Nope. Anyways, I'm not singing on the podcast, but that's all for housekeeping for today. Cool. Well, later on today's episode, I'll be talking with Jeff Rader, who is the co-founder and co-CEO of Harry's, the razor company that you might have heard of. He also co-founded Warby Parker, the glasses company that you've definitely heard of.

But first, the presidential race is heating up already, and aside from the usual fanfare around the frontrunner candidates like Trump and Biden, there are also some longshot candidates creating space for themselves on...

Podcasts of all places. And here to give us more insight into what's going on is Fast Company contributor Clint Rainey. Hey, Clint. Hey, Yas. We all know about the growing power of podcasts. And I have to say that because I'm on a podcast right now. Subscribe, rate, and review. Subscribe, rate, and review. But I am curious about the role they play for outsider presidential candidates. It sounds like you've spent a lot of time with some fringe characters.

Yeah, no kidding. I guess the easiest answer to that is that, you know, presidential long shot candidates used to have essentially no choice but to physically crisscross the country to try to amass whatever size following they could. And historically, just so I can put it into context, who are you thinking of like the Ross Perot's of back in the day?

I don't think that Ross Perot would qualify necessarily as a fringe candidate. Yeah, it's true. Something that I don't know how many people are aware of is that there are hundreds of candidates who run every four years for president, but you just don't hear about any of them. Yeah. I suppose here we're trying to limit it to the folks who have some measure of name recognition, at least.

So in your piece, you sort of focused on three, which was Vivek Ramaswamy, Marianne Williamson, and RFK Jr., right? Right.

Right. So Vivek Ramaswamy is this young, smooth-talking Republican. He's a biotech entrepreneur who's worth supposedly several hundred million dollars. Marianne Williamson is maybe better known at this point since she ran the last time around for president. She's the Hollywood self-help guru. And then the third person, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., doesn't need an introduction necessarily thanks to his last name, but

in terms of an actual job. He's technically an environmental lawyer who has sort of carved out a somewhat notorious spot for himself in recent days by opposing vaccines and beginning to promote some conspiracies about who assassinated his uncle, President John F. Kennedy. I didn't totally realize that until I read your article, and then I went really deep.

It's also crazy that he is married to Cheryl from Curb Your Enthusiasm, like Larry David's wife on the show. I didn't even know that. Yeah, I think about this all the time, guys. So is he who Ted Danson is playing on Curb Your Enthusiasm? No, Ted Danson's more hot.

Anyway, we're talking about the sort of medium of podcasts. And for my nerds out there, as Marshall McLuhan once said, the medium is the message. What does appearing on a podcast give these candidates that may be appearing on CNN or Fox News doesn't?

Yeah.

The idea, I think, for them is that they go on to a sort of niche show that allows them a chance to push one particular message. I think they get a better chance to control the narrative. You know, they're not on a show on CNN or Fox News where the host has a shorter attention span for this sort of stuff. And frankly, the networks themselves don't have as much appetite for some of these, you know, kind of crazier conspiracy-leaning ideas anymore.

And I think it also gives them a chance to try to expand their following. I mean, these are sort of an untapped audience. I don't know how successfully, but, you know, in theory, I think at least it's something that they see a value in doing. You know, I think that a sort of short TV clip or even a short clip from podcasts can obviously get circulated around, but it's not a huge percentage of the population that listens to podcasts, right? No.

What can you say about the impact of these appearances on actual results?

Honestly, I think it's too early to know the answer to that question. But I think it's fair to say that there is an amount of these candidates doing something that we might see happen more frequently with more mainstream candidates, for maybe lack of a better word. I mean, we just saw Ron DeSantis announce his candidacy for president on Twitter, right? That went so well. Right. Yeah. Yeah.

I tweeted out that this was a low point for the audio medium on there. And as an audio professional, it's very sad. You know, Clint, I think I know how you found out about this. But how did you find out about this? How did you get onto this topic? Over.

Over the kind of the start of the spring, I was writing a feature for the magazine that kind of looked at the conservative counterattack on wokeism in corporate America. Hell yeah. Yeah, I know. Everyone's favorite topic. Ramaswamy was maybe the man or one of the main characters in that story. And it turned out he actually announced his candidacy for president while I was reporting. But he also had just six months prior announced

started this asset management firm called Strive that he was calling a rival to the so-called big three, BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street. Its promise was to invest in companies that focus solely on profits as opposed to have to their social impact. And they were using this label for that mission that they called Post ESG, which I just became curious in what definition they were using for that term. There were a lot of mainstream media stories about Strive.

But none of them explained what that term meant. And I just went down a Google rabbit hole and eventually found this interview that Ramaswamy gave to an obscure sort of insider finance world podcast called ETF Prime. Everybody has a podcast. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, and not to belittle the podcast or anything, but the website, I went to it and it was kind of low budget and everything. And I was just like, how did he even find this thing? Did they reach out to him? Did he reach out to them? But Ramos-Pombi's interview was very free flowing. It seemed like a space where...

anyone, not just a presidential candidate, might say things that they would not have said to a regular reporter. And it looks as if Ram Swamy has appeared on maybe just shy of 100 podcasts since like over the past six months, which is a lot.

That's a lot. That sounds like hell. I mean, you're appearing on a podcast now, but would you want to do this a hundred times over? Yeah, I know. And most of his were the hour long version. So this is just a side note for me as a podcast producer myself. Nobody needs a podcast longer than an hour. Yeah.

Please cut it down. I'm looking at you, Pete Holmes. You're saying that you don't enjoy Joe Rogan. No, absolutely not. Can I be honest? I once listened to an episode and actually did enjoy it. This was a few years ago. Who was the guest? I don't know.

It was like someone so random. I don't even remember, but they talked a lot about like exercise. I mean, it's just there is the whole I mean, he does three hour shows every single week. So it can't all be disinformation and right wing conspiracy theories. Josh is just asking questions. Oh, yeah. Poorly.

Anyways, keep your podcast short. Editing's key. Clint, you made a point in your article that I thought was really good, which is that people almost feel like they can say more on a podcast than they might to a journalist. What do you think it is about the medium? Like, why do people unburden themselves like this on podcasts?

I don't know. It may be that it's just a new medium. And as you pointed out, it doesn't attract quite the number of viewers, listeners, readers, whatever as other media do. Also, it's a conversation, right? It's not like a Fox News interview where,

you have to go into the studio or you're behind a green screen and some very contrived artificial setting. And I think you're kind of always on your toes as a result of that. Weirdly, most of them are on Zoom. So like, it's not as if there's no video. There is oftentimes video as well.

But usually the person calling in is doing it from home, from their library or whatever, a bunch of books behind them. They're on Zoom. They're just having what's in their mind probably begins to sound or feel like just a regular conversation. Yeah. Especially when it lasts for an hour. Yeah.

And, you know, like, listen, all three candidates that you mentioned have talked about the sort of censorship industrial complex. So my last question for you is what are some of the memorable moments you can share with us? Is there anything that stays in your mind rent free?

Oh, man. Yeah. So I think that one of the big picture takeaways that I had just confirmed something that I already knew. But a lot of these podcasts are outliers for a reason. And if you as a presidential candidate subject yourself to an hour long conversation with these people, you're very much at their mercy.

You may have found yourself an unusually receptive audience because you know the kinds of topics that they like to talk about and what their ideology is. But, you know, if they go on some weird tangent or whatever, you're along for the ride. A good example that comes to mind is...

this podcast called Stay Free by Russell Brand. For whatever reason, both Marianne Williamson and RFK Jr. went on to Russell Brand's Stay Free podcast. Interesting. Yeah. I mean, it truly is exactly what you would imagine if you gave Russell Brand a microphone for an hour. It's like this...

I don't know how to classify his comedy style. It was never my thing. But to me, it has always felt like verbal slapstick, kind of stupid. I don't know what it says about me that I keep getting recommended this podcast on my feeds. Oh, yeah. It shows up on my feeds, too. Maybe it has a pretty good audience. Yeah. I mean, relatively speaking, it's not like the biggest podcast in the world. But like Russell Brand's not a nobody. Right. Right. Right.

And now it does this, I guess. Star of Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Russell Brand. And the spinoff, Get Him to the Greek. Oh, yeah. Which is one of those movies that I've strangely seen multiple times without trying to. Classic, yeah. Yeah.

But yeah, so he, maybe he was always a conspiracy theorist. I don't know. But on the podcast, he's definitely, he goes that direction very early and happily, it seems. And in some ways, I'm imagining that that's what attracted both Williamson and Kennedy. It was this combination of him asking these conspiracy theory-laced questions in that very bizarre run-on sentence format.

filled brand style. I was cringing for them listening to these questions. It was just like they kind of occupied this liminal space between being like a complete softball and then being like a shouty rant where he would go on for seriously 30 seconds to a minute without even seeming to take a breath. Yeah, he's got the same host vibe as me, you know? Yeah, Skanya and Russell Brands.

occupy the same space in podcast hosting. I don't think that's quite true. I'm just going to look dirty next time and yell a lot. All right. Well, that was great, Clint. We're going to take a quick break, followed by my interview with Jeff Rader about celebrating 10 years at Harry's Razors and how the direct-to-consumer model has evolved since he first started out in the game. ♪

Today, we're going to talk a little bit about the sort of macro environment for startups and about your career experience. So, Jeff, I'm going to dive right in. I know this is kind of throwing you off of the deep end, but you raised money to start Warby Parker and Harry's a while ago. And I'm curious, when you look at startups today, how has the landscape changed when it comes to fundraising?

Well, I think for a long, long time, it was a really positive environment for startups to raise capital, driven by the fact that interest rates were really low and lots of money was therefore flowing into venture capital where folks felt like they could make really attractive returns.

And I think there are a bunch of venture capital funds, early stage investors who had done really, really well investing in early stage companies over the last decade. You know, I think that the environment today is certainly more challenging in terms of ability to raise capital. And I think that great companies are still getting funded today.

maybe not on the same terms that they were before at the same valuations. But I think there's definitely still lots of capital available for great companies. And I think what the environment is doing, which I think will be a good thing over the long term, is forcing companies

companies to be really disciplined, you know, having them recognize maybe they can't raise as much capital as they could before. And therefore they have to be more thoughtful about where they're investing. For a long time, there was lots of incentives to grow, not at all costs. I think companies should never grow at all costs, but to invest

invest substantially in growth and put down lots of growth bets. And I think now the environment's a little bit more balanced, you know, like make a few bets, be highly disciplined, make those bets work and do so in a way that either drives the overall business profitability or certainly puts you on a path to profitability.

How important is profitability and is it more important than it was before? I think it probably depends on the company and the situation and their growth rates and their stage. I guess I'd say at Harry's is, you know, we've been profitable in the past and over the last 12 months we've been profitable.

again. And I think we intend to continue to be profitable. When you're not profitable and you're burning cash, you're then relying on outside sources of capital to continue to sustain the business. Harry's 10 years old at this point in our journey. I think it's important and valuable for us to be able to sort of control our own destiny and to be able to invest the profits in the business back into growth bets as opposed to being reliant on outside sources of capital to fund those bets.

That's not to say that we would never consider raising outside capital. I think we would, especially if you were going to do something like a major acquisition or something, you know, that would be a significant shift in the trajectory of our business. But I think as we think about our core day-to-day business, we think it is important to be profitable so that we can control our own destiny. That makes a lot of sense. So we talked a lot about the economic environment, but I want to actually go back and talk to you a little bit about the direct-to-consumer model itself.

I think it's fair to say that you pioneered it, but I also know a lot of D2C brands are on Target shelves or are now in CVS. Totally. I'd love to hear your thinking on the space and whether direct-to-consumer still matters. When we built Harry's and Warby Parker before that, we first and foremost saw them as brands. Brands.

that had the responsibility to make people's lives better. Like our mission at Harry's is to create things people like more. Direct to consumer, harrys.com, orbyparker.com. We've launched a brand called Cat Person, catperson.com, shopflamingo.com. All the brands that we have, I think are like great channels to access customers. I think in the old days, we might've thought about having a flagship store for Harry's.

When we launched Harry's, we had a barbershop in Soho in addition to our website. And I think it's amazing for brands to have like a place to live and where you can really experience the brands. I view Harry's.com as the flagship store for the Harry's brand. I think of our homepage hero image as the shop window sort of to the flagship store. And it's an amazing flagship store because you can come and you can learn about our products.

we can tell you as much as we possibly can about the company, about our social mission, and then we can hopefully make your purchase experience as easy as possible. And as we built Harry's, and I think Warby Parker before Harry's, we recognized that not everybody wants to come to that flagship store to buy our brand. And just like other brands, great brands that are available beyond just their flagship stores. And so, you know, when we started Warby Parker, what we

What was clear to us was that people wanted to come into an environment that we controlled and owned and ran to purchase our glasses. So we opened up a store in our office, and it was highly successful. Our entire office was full on the weekend of people coming in to try on glasses and learn about our brand. It was this really cool experience. I remember sitting in a focus group with some of our customers and asking them, how could we make your experience better?

with Harry's and one of our customers said, "I just love to have you be available on my Sunday family shopping trip at Target." And I was like, "Oh man, like we could do that." And I think that it was on us to make sure that the experience that they had at Target would be a great experience. That the products would be the same products, that the prices would be the same as our website, so there'd be consistency.

that they would feel like when they shopped us in a store that we were almost like in a store within a store, that the Harry's world was clear and consistent and communicated what we wanted to customers. It was awesome to have partners like Target and then Walmart later, and then a bunch of amazing grocery stores and drug stores and Costco and Amazon and all these places where we could kind of have that vision and then try to bring that vision to life for people. And so now Harry's is available virtually everywhere. And I think that that's a great thing. It's on us to be where our customers want us to be.

I feel like when direct-to-consumer first started out, at least, the appeal was that you would pass on...

a lower cost to consumers because your stuff would be cheaper. You wouldn't have to pay to have it stocked in big box stores. You might, you know, spend a little less on areas like marketing, although I feel like a lot of DTC brands ultimately spend a lot on marketing. But now that you're sitting next to Gillette on Target shelves, does that mean you're just making less money than Gillette per unit? How did the economics of that shake out?

So there are a couple of things that we did in our model at Harry's that were different in order to be able to make what we think of as really exceptional product at great value. The first is we bought a razor blade factory in Germany. So we like totally vertically integrated manufacturing. And then we expanded it pretty significantly and made significant investments in kind of improving the quality of the products along the way. Because we own manufacturing, you know, of razors and razor blades, we're able to, you know, sort of deliver products to people at great value. So I think that's one piece of the equation for us.

As it relates to the economics of selling online and at a retail store, I think you kind of have to think about all the costs that also go into selling online. So you've got cost to maintain your website. You've got transaction processing costs for credit cards. You've got distribution costs. People have got to pick the product and pack it into a box. You've got shipping and fulfillment costs. And so there are real costs in getting products from kind of our website to customers, but

And in retailers, you have to pay a margin to the retailers. You have to give them kind of a part of the sale. And I think for me, more than anything, more than the economics, like what's really important is that we are a brand that shows up consistently for customers how and where and when they want to buy us. And we know that there are some folks who want to buy on our site and go buy in store and go back and forth. And like, that's great. Like, and people who just...

want to find us when they're sort of buying a bunch of other stuff in stores at great retailers. And so we think of that as like the most customer centric thing to do. And if we're just giving people good experiences where they want to be, then like that is the sort of playbook to build a great brand over time. And I think that DTC still plays a super important role kind of as our flagship store. And it's a place where lots and lots of people come to learn about the brand and

experience our products, try us. It has a much bigger impact on our overall business than maybe just the sales from DTC, although those are material too. And so we continue to invest a lot there because we feel like it is really important to invest in your flagship store.

Okay, we're back with Clint and it's time to wrap up the show with a segment we're calling Keeping Tabs. This is where each of us shares a story, trend, or company we're following right now. And Clint, I'm going to ask you first, what are you keeping tabs on? I've been following the debt ceiling deal because I feel like I have to, but, you know, who wants to talk about that?

I went kind of on this tangent, which is electric vehicle territory. And I think it just sort of also reminded me that like outside of Tesla and maybe a few others that you occasionally see in the news, like Rivian or Polestar or whatever, there are dozens of these startups. Many of them have raised sizable chunks of venture capital and some cases even gone public despite

being pre-revenue. Like literally they have- Well, a lot of them went public via SPAC, right? Yes. People will, they're investing in or buying shares in these companies in hopes of like Tesla like returns. But not only have they not produced any product yet, they don't have a car out, but they haven't even gotten the level of scrutiny that places like Tesla, the companies like Tesla have.

right? I mean, Tesla has a lot of problems, but we know what those problems are. Thanks to all of the reporting about them. But it was an interesting reminder to me of these companies that are kind of out in the shadows and when they don't get any sort of accountability, what they're capable of doing. Totally. Lordstown vibes. You know what I'm saying? Josh, what are you keeping tabs on? So I'm keeping tabs on the

bigoted anti-Target campaign that's been happening for a while now. If you haven't been hearing about this, there is a right-wing anti-LGBTQ campaign against Target stores pride merchandise and displays. And we're going into... This is very much a bummer and a downer. I don't know if there's anything...

necessarily like important to glean from why this is happening. Besides, it's just an organized part of a larger campaign against queer and trans people in this country. But I'm keeping my eye on it because we're heading into Pride Month. This is one of many stores that are to various degrees embracing pride and LGBTQ, you know, some criticisms of rainbow washing and stuff like that. But nonetheless, still,

I'm less concerned about the companies and more concerned about people who work for these companies and then just the queer and trans people, like my sister who's trans, who frankly I'm afraid for. And I think companies need to do a better job protecting their employees in this time. And that's what I'm really hoping to keep an eye on. I like that. So yeah. So keeping an eye on that and hopefully...

Yeah, I think that community really needs our support right now. And these companies like Target could make a huge difference. So hopefully they step up and do more things than protecting their bottom line. Cool. Yas, how about you? Anything to bring us up? Well, so I've written a lot about the sort of dieting industry writ large. I wrote a next lead about Noom a while ago and Weight Watchers. And I've obviously written a whole bunch about Ozempic.

and other semaglutides that are rolling out everywhere. Can we just sing the Ozempic theme song right now? Oh, oh, Ozempic, you know.

Yeah. You know, just to backtrack a little bit, Ozempic is a medication. It's a semi-glutide medication. And basically, it was originally intended for people who have diabetes, but it is also used off-label as a weight loss drug, and it basically helps you lose weight.

a ton of weight in a very short amount of time. There are some bad side effects like nausea and diarrhea, but also if you get off it, you're screwed. You're going to gain weight very fast. That's what the report seems to suggest. And this past year, it's really exploded. So companies like Rho are putting ads for other sort of comparable drugs on the market all over New York subways. So I get to see it every morning. But today I was just reading a piece about the drug being introduced to teens and

and the downsides that could have. So that was kind of upsetting. And I've also been thinking about it more because we're headed into summer and I think we're about to see an Ozempic summer. We're about to see a lot of really thin bodies and unrealistic body standards and everyone should just be braced for it.

Hot Ozempic summer. Hot Ozempic summer, exactly. Got a pretty depressing run of keeping tabs this... This was a downer, but we need to find more. Please tweet at us with stories more along the line of the Pacino-De Niro debate, and we'll include those. Yeah, I'd love to take those up. I was trying to think of a hot or not for today. Didn't really come together for me. But next time, I'll be back with a stupid one next time.

And that's it for Most Innovative Companies. I'd like to thank Clint Rainey, contributing writer of Fast Company, for joining us. Thanks, Clint. Thanks for having me on. This was fun. Our show is produced by Avery Miles, mixing and sound design by Nicholas Torres, and our executive producer is Josh Christensen. Remember again to subscribe, rate, and review, and we'll see you next week.