Meet the man making money for Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly
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You can learn how Stripe helps companies of all sizes make progress at Stripe.com. That's Stripe.com to learn more. Stripe. Make progress.

And of course, podcasting.

Yes, the thing you're listening to right now. Well, it's increasingly being produced directly by companies like venture capital firms, investment funds, and a new crop of creators who one day want to be investors themselves.

And what is actually going on with these acquisitions this year, especially in the AI space? Why are so many big players in tech deciding not to acquire and instead license tech and hire away co-founders? The answer, it turns out, is a lot more complicated than it seems. You'll hear all that and more this month on Decoder with Nilay Patel, presented by Stripe. You can listen to Decoder wherever you get your podcasts.

From the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is Channels with Peter Kafka. That is me. I'm also the chief correspondent at Business Insider. If you've been listening to this show, if you've been reading the stuff I've written, if you've read anything about the election, you've heard about the podcast election, you've heard about the Manosphere, you've heard about the rise of right-wing slash conservative podcasts, and we can tie all those up with one guest who's here with me today. It's Chris Balfe. He runs Red Seat Ventures. Welcome, Chris. Thank you. Thanks for having me.

I did get your name right, right? You got it. Nailed it. I've known you for a long time. I met you when you were working with Glenn Beck back in the day. Yeah, maybe 2006 or something like that. So maybe almost 20 years. Oh my God, world. Yeah.

Explain to listeners what it is that you do at Red Seed Ventures. Yeah, so we work with creators and help them build their digital businesses. So that means everything from podcasts, YouTube shows, to subscription businesses, VOD networks, all that type of stuff.

And we provide everything that they need so that they can come in, do a great show, and we help them grow it through all the different platforms and, most importantly, monetize it across platforms. So we have a sales team, but we also have a growth and marketing team that helps them to maximize their presence across all these different platforms. So I'm a person who wants to start a YouTube slash podcast slash internet podcast.

presence. You sort of provide that to me all in one box. Yeah, that's exactly right. We get referrals all the time, both from existing clients, which is awesome, from agencies, PR people, managers, all that. And we have a conversation with the people about what we think their potential is in the space. What do they think their potential is in the space? What do they want to do? What's motivating them to go kind of independent or creator-driven?

And we see if there's a fit for us to play a role, however big or small that may be. So you don't work exclusively with people on the right side of the political spectrum. You work with a lot of them. Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, Barry Weiss's digital presence, other folks people would have heard of.

For sure. We didn't set out to be exclusively in that space, but two things happened along the way. One is I ran Glenn Beck's business for 12 years, so naturally there were existing relationships in that space. And secondly, there's a little bit of a network effect where once we've got someone that's doing great in that space, it's a little bit easier for us to plug into an existing infrastructure, sales team, marketing team, all those other things that know what they're doing in that space. So you're working with Beck and Kelly. Yeah.

Tucker Carlson says, I need a new home. I left Fox. I was pushed out of Fox. Can you help me set something up? Yeah. I mean, I think we should wear that easy. And in most cases, it's me going after the people that I really want. And sometimes we're getting aggressive about how do we go and meet those people. But generally speaking, where we're at right now, we're pretty selective and we're really going after top tier clients. So I want to ask you how the business is going, but let's pull out broader than that because we talked a few weeks ago for a story I wrote for

Business Insider about whether it's a podcast election or a YouTube election. You gave me a great quote, which is like, it's both. Did you see this coming a year ago, two years ago, beyond that, that podcast slash YouTube would be an important vector in the 2024 election? I wish I could say that I saw all this coming. But really, when we started Red Sea Ventures, which is 10 years ago now, we're coming up almost on a 10-year anniversary in January. And

What we hoped to do was to do for a bunch of other personalities what we did for Glenn Beck in helping to build a media company. But I don't think we had the foresight to say that this is all going to be going quite so prolifically in this direction. So now it's easy for us to see creator economy, podcasts, all these different ways that we're able to make money. And there are now – there's more shorthand ways to talk about it.

People know what a podcast is.

We knew that we had big hosts. We knew that we had big shows that were going to create an impact. But I don't think anyone knew, you know, quite how big the story would be. And obviously, Rogan plays a huge role in that. Yeah. And why? And I mean, a lot of people have written about it, but you're in it. I mean, why do you think there's sort of a shorthand? Oh, the Trump campaign went there because that's where young men were, which I'm sure is true to an extent. But I'm sure there's more to it. Why do you think that?

And Trump did lots of TV, too. And he's a TV guy. And you can look at his cabinet, right? He consumes a lot of Fox News still. But why do you think he and his team were interested in podcasts as a campaign tool? Yeah, I think there's two reasons that make the most sense for why this all happened seemingly quickly, even though it was building over the course of years and years.

One is the audiences have moved there. It's clear that there's such a big audience for clearly Joe Rogan, but also Megyn Kelly, Tucker Carlson. You know, the Apple top podcasts came out today and Tucker Carlson was the number one new podcast of the year on Apple.

It was Tucker Carlson, Joe Rogan, true crime because true crime never goes away. And that was – it's what it looked like. I mean that's the universe of podcasts. Yeah, for sure. There's a lot of other options but those are the ones that tend to get – I mean the Daily New York Times has reported four million downloads a day and that was a while ago. So who knows what that number is now.

They're big audiences and that's where ears and eyeballs are moving. But the second thing is that it allows people to have longer form conversations than a six-minute Fox News clip or MSNBC clip. Oh, we got to go now. Sorry. Yeah, exactly. That was a little joke. Yeah, exactly. And some people do better in that long form environment. Some people do worse in that long form environment. But that's more the media moment we're in is deeper, longer conversations and more

In some ways, that's going to drive the types of candidates that are successful in the next wave of elections. And then in terms of the industry, I mean, so again, I met you when you were doing Glenn Beck and Glenn Beck at the time had left – went back in and out of Fox, but he'd gone and built his own direct-to-consumer business, Mercury Arts, right? Yeah.

Did I get the name right? Blaze, we called it. But yeah, initially his overall company was called Mercury Radio Arts. Mercury Radio Arts. And there was a lot of discussion. And I wrote about like, this is the next wave. We're going to see more people doing what he did, leaving mainstream media, going to digital and building an audience there. And it did not happen until really the last couple years. And-

I have a couple of theories about that, but I want to know why you think it didn't happen before and it seems to be happening now.

Two things. One is the technology and tools have caught up in a big way. So when we launched the Blaze, we had to mail people Roku boxes and say, hook this up to the back of your TV. You might need something called an HDMI cable. We'll send you one of those if you want one. You were literally sending people boxes. Yeah. We'd mail them a Roku box and explain to them how they download an app and watch it.

And so clearly with every TV in the world having connectivity and every toaster in the world having connectivity, you can now – that technical hurdle and user behavior hurdle is gone. 60 million people watch the Mike Tyson, Jake Paul, whatever that was. Yeah, exactly. So that's the first change is an acceptance, a technology acceptance and an audience behavior acceptance. The second change is a monetization side, which is we're –

Where are the dollars? And Jeff Zucker has the famous quote that he's been assigned over the years of digital dimes for analog dollars or whatever it is. I think we're in a position now where those dollars are more digital than they are analog. In a lot of cases, when we think about people who are in both a linear network space and a digital space,

It's easier to scale, quicker to scale, and potentially more lucrative in the digital space. So the eyeballs are there. The money is there. You're saying it's potentially more lucrative than a traditional big dollar TV contract.

Yeah, and I think that definitely depends on the talent. We talk to folks who want to leave traditional media and we hear how much money they're making and we say, wow, that's a great deal for you. And if I model out how long it's going to take you to make that, if we're successful, it might be three years before you can make that kind of money again. And that's if we're successful. We might not be. So for a lot of people, we suggest that

hang on to those coattails of big fat media paychecks as long as you can. Keep your network to a good job and start a podcast. If networks let them. In a lot of cases, ESPN and others are famous for clamping down on all rights from talent. And we always push talent to say, let's do it on the side to start. Let's start building and then maybe you're ready in a couple of years if you can. But for the most part, we think that

It's only right for certain talent at big levels. If you're trying to replace a $2 million a year paycheck, it's going to take time unless you're Tucker Carlson. We'll be right back with Chris Bath. But first, a word from a sponsor. Support for this podcast comes from Stripe.

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Hey, it's Liam from Decoder with Nilay Patel. We spent a lot of time talking about some of the most important people in tech and business, about what they're putting resources to and why they think it's so critical for the future. That's why we're doing this special series, diving into some of the most unique ways companies are spending money today. For instance, what does it mean to start buying and using AI at work? How much is that costing companies? What products are they buying? And most importantly, what are they doing with it? And of course, podcasting.

Yes, the thing you're listening to right now. Well, it's increasingly being produced directly by companies like venture capital firms, investment funds, and a new crop of creators who one day want to be investors themselves.

And what is actually going on with these acquisitions this year, especially in the AI space? Why are so many big players in tech deciding not to acquire and instead license tech and hire away co-founders? The answer, it turns out, is a lot more complicated than it seems. You'll hear all that and more this month on Decoder with Nilay Patel, presented by Stripe. You can listen to Decoder wherever you get your podcasts. Thumbtack presents the ins and outs of caring for your home.

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And we're back. I want to put Tucker and Megan to the side for a second. The kind of talent that does well in your environment right now, is this some like, I always thought it's people who are, you know, have radio backgrounds because they're used to talking into a mic for a long time. They don't need to have other guests necessarily. They're also doing it daily, probably with less support than TV. Is there a certain makeup of a person that works well in a digital environment that you

Flip it around. Is there someone who can do really well on TV and doesn't translate either talent-wise or doesn't want to put in the effort that you need to do that? Yeah, that's an easier way to answer the question, which is what doesn't work? What doesn't work is someone who's there by virtue of the time period that they're on TV. So if you're a nightly news anchor, no offense to the nightly news anchors, you are unlikely to be successful as a podcaster because you're being paid

$5, $10, $15 million. And if you were out that night and your B host goes in, the numbers probably are exactly the same. And therefore, the replacement value, if you will, to use a baseball analogy, is not that high for you. But can't you argue that you would... I totally get what you're saying. I would also say if I'm, let's say, Lester Holt. Yeah. I don't know what his audience is at the moment, but you would say, and it's much smaller than it was a year ago or five years ago, but you'd still say, all right, there's still...

a big audience that knows who I am, there must be a sliver of them that would follow me to a digital platform. That was sort of the logic of all of this, right? Five, 10% of your audience comes with you to digital when you left mainstream. I don't know if that's the working thesis now, but shouldn't there just by the exposure you're getting on mainstream media be enough to bring a digital audience with you? I'd say mostly not that.

that there's really a fandom component to it. And that's the dark arts part of this that we try to figure out when each person comes to us and we try to evaluate whether they're going to be a good fit for us and for the medium is how much do they have real fans versus how much do they have just viewers or listeners who would consume whatever replacement show went in there if that person were to go someplace else.

So we try to evaluate that fandom and people always, you know, agents in particular always say, is it the number of Facebook followers or, you know, followers on X or whatever? It's not really any of those things. It's watching the show. It's watching, it's listening and talking to people about how they react to this person. And would you kind of proverbially walk across broken glass because we're switching you from a push medium to a pull medium? And that means people are going to want to have to pull.

Right. They don't have to go get a Roku box anymore, but they do have to go find you. They may have to pay for you in certain cases. Do you use any kind of metrics? I remember this when Substack was going out and recruiting people for their whatever they call it, whatever their advanced program was. They weren't just looking at people with the most Twitter followers. They were looking at engagement and replies and how often your stuff was quote tweeted, etc.,

Yeah, I don't think we have gotten that savvy, but I also don't think it necessarily would be worth it for us to do that. There's no... You're not polling people's Q value. No, no. And also, you know, Red Seat Ventures' strategy, such as we have one, is that we want to work with a small number of big shows, not a big number of small shows. There are a lot of networks out there, you know, that are good at working with 100, 200, 500, 1,000 shows.

that's not us. We're good at giving a very high level of attention to a smaller number of shows and really being partners with those shows across everything that's out there today and everything that's going to come in five years. Who the heck knows what platform is going to be? I wish I knew, but I don't. It's going to be dominant for monetization in five years, but we are going to figure that out for you. We're going to help you become a leader there, and we're going to help you grow and monetize an audience on that, whatever that platform may be.

Megan Kelly was a Fox star, went to NBC. That didn't work out. She was making an enormous amount of money and she's kind of rebuilding herself. Tucker Carlson was pushed out of Fox, probably near the height of his powers. Did you have any concern that like what he was doing wouldn't translate to digital? I think there was a lot of people. A lot of people said, you know what? He's a big deal. He's very important. But whoever they put in the same time slot is going to replace him. Same replacement value idea you had. And he can go to X or U2, but he's not going to be meaningfully important.

Definitely not. I felt very strongly that Tucker was going to have the number one podcast in the country or number two, depending on how quickly Joe Rogan grows. Why compared to any other person who's on TV with a big audience? Yeah, I think the answer for him is his ability to

be at the front of the creation of media moments rather than cover media moments. This is one of the things we talk about a lot in news and especially in right-of-center news, that there's a lot of podcasts, YouTubes, TV shows in particular, radio shows, that

News happens. They react to it. It's interesting because they're interesting people. But that's sort of the end of it. There are a few personalities who have the ability to create news cycles rather than react to news cycles. And, you know, I would point to Glenn Beck as a big one of those back when he was in the Fox News days in particular, but also on The Blaze. And I would point to Tucker Carlson, absolutely, and say this is a person who's –

was must watch, not just for the right, but sort of for everyone to try to figure out what the heck everyone else was going to be talking about. He's going to say something intriguing, inflammatory, both. He's going to go visit Vladimir Putin. Yeah, exactly. Odious, but some people really want to watch it. Yeah, and I think that the idea that

He can create the news and those are the people who – and Megan is doing that increasingly right now. The coverage that Megan is getting across the entire internet for every single thing that she says or does right now is really astounding. I haven't seen anything like it since the Glenn Beck Fox News days where –

There's a newsworthy piece of content that comes out of every one of her podcasts these days. And I also think that that goes toward this shift that we've been talking about where for a long time, whatever happened on podcasts happened between the ears of the people listening and it didn't make it successfully out into the rest of the world. And now the top podcasts are making news more often, not because the shows have gotten better, but because –

People are paying more attention and realizing great content is happening there. I assume, frankly, the fact that most of these podcasts are also video shows makes it that much easier for it to travel. If you're doing a TV news segment, you now have a couple seconds that you can fill with. Yeah, or a clip to link to from a website. It's so hard to link to audio of a podcast, which is stupid that it's hard, but it is hard. Yeah.

whereas linking to an exact second inside of a YouTube video is so easy. It's also a picture. You don't have to, it's not just a quote. Yeah. That's more compelling. Yeah. How is the money working? There used to be a stigma about advertising on sort of right-wing conservative spaces in general and podcasts, same problem, podcasts in general, right, for different reasons. It seems from my outside perspective, you're still struggling with that. You're not getting blue chip advertisers on Tucker Carlson's show. Is that?

First of all, is my perception correct? I think it's correct that it's rare that we see any Fortune 500 company spending a lot of dollars in any controversial space.

News, true crime, right-of-center politics, left-of-center politics in the podcast space. Generally speaking, brand safety – and I'm doing air quotes right now for everyone listening. Brand safety is still something that people – that big brands are concerned about, worried about, obsessed with in certain cases. And therefore, they avoid all politics and all news and all true crime and all other people – things that people like to listen to. Do you think that changes simply because –

People are more familiar with this stuff because it's more popular, because politically we're in a climate now where stuff that people maybe would have wanted to shy away from a year ago, they're willing to accept now. They think the audience is there. Or do you think you're always going to be sort of fighting an uphill battle?

I'd say I hope it changes. I hope that advertisers realize that a small number of ex-users who are not listeners of the program that they're going after are attempting to weaponize the fellow fans to go after you and say, you will never buy that Ford if you advertise. Well, guess what? They weren't going to buy that Ford anyway. Don't listen to them. So I hope it changes.

Normally, I am not optimistic about that change because of the overall resistance of brands to take risks. I will say that one thing that is...

making me slightly more optimistic is not so much the cultural change or the acceptance of Trump at UFC or at football games or any of those types of things. I do think people should be paying attention to those things, the fact that he won the popular vote, but I don't think that's what's going to drive it. I think what has a little bit of a chance of driving it is Elon Musk and what he's done at X to be a warrior for free speech, but at the same time, hopefully at some point, try to build a platform that's really successful for advertisers.

Yeah, I mean, he's done his best to make it a terrible place for advertisers, right? He literally told them to go fuck themselves. Yeah, he did say that. And the rational move for anyone who bought an advertising-based business and didn't want ads to go away and knew that if he tweeted was to stop, knew his tweets were upsetting advertisers would be to shut up or tweet less. And he showed no interest in doing that. So since he seems to be the same person he was for the last couple of years, how do you think that is going to shift the ad market?

The key metric for advertisers is the effectiveness of their advertising. So for the moment, it's not the most attractive place for advertisers because it's not working for advertisers in the same way that Facebook and Google and Meta have – Meta is Facebook, I get it. But overall, Meta, Instagram, all those other places. They have an enormous scale. They have an enormous scale, but also it works. If I place an ad for my amazing cooler that keeps your soda cold for 300 hours –

and I can really dial in on my creative and I can really dial in on my ad targeting, I'm going to sell a ton of coolers. Because they have enormous scale and data about how to reach you. And you also mentioned someone selling a cooler. They're not selling a Ford, right? You're not doing brand ads.

through YouTube and Facebook generally, some of them, but it's still more direct response. Twitter for its pre-Elon history was the opposite. They didn't have scale. They didn't have that much data. Well, they didn't have scale though. I mean, you're talking about what, 100 million daily actives or something? I mean, that's scale. Not compared to a YouTube or- Yeah, less scale. And you can talk to people who used to sell the ads there. They said, what we told our buyers eventually was, this is how you can reach basically sort of like

blue state, blue city. It wasn't so much that it was blue or liberal, but like you can reach coastal elite type people and that's where maybe you do want your brand stuff in front of them. Yeah. It seems like Elon's engineered something where he's got the worst of both worlds. He doesn't have those elites and he doesn't have the scale. Right. But again, I don't think that scale is necessarily the issue. There are websites in the world that have

a million monthly active users that are able to convert, uh, you know, advertisers. The issue is the effectiveness of the advertising, which goes to ad targeting, ad skippability, you know, uh, frequency caps, all the things that Facebook and YouTube have mastered that look easy from the outside that look, Oh my gosh, there's a 15 second ad for this product. And, uh,

How hard is that to create? Well, it's really hard. And I think that eventually Elon is likely to crack that. And I really hope he does because...

We are looking very carefully for another place to monetize video in anywhere the same world as YouTube, which has become huge for us across our clients. And right now there isn't that platform. He's one of his things when he bought it. Oh, this will be on YouTube and I'll bring creators over and I'll give them a better deal. It's one of the many things he said and sort of has dropped or it's harder than he imagined. But you think that it's still plausible that he could make that into a, if not a YouTube, a YouTube-like place for you?

I think so. I hope so. I think, you know, he's going to be pretty busy, you know, but somehow he's managed to run six companies and do everything else. So what's what's cutting the government while we're at it? We'll be right back with Chris Bath. But first, a word from a sponsor. Support for this podcast comes from Stripe.

Payment management software isn't something your customers think about that often. They see your product, they want to buy it, and then they buy it. That's about as complex as it gets. But under the hood of that process, there are a lot of really complicated things happening that have to go right in order for that sale to go through.

Stripe handles the complexity of financial infrastructure, offering a seamless experience for business owners and their customers. For example, Stripe can make sure that your customers see their currency and preferred payment method when they shop. So checking out never feels like a chore. Stripe is a payment and billing platform supporting millions of businesses around the world, including companies like Uber, BMW, and DoorDash. Stripe has helped countless startups and established companies alike reach their growth targets, make progress on their missions, and reach more customers globally.

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And we're back. Let's table Elon for a second. Coming back to something I mentioned earlier, the idea that this is podcast, but it's also YouTube. How do those work differently as businesses for you and your clients? Yeah, they do work pretty differently.

We sell direct response advertising. And just to be clear, I think anyone listening to this show gets it. But, right, the majority of the shows you're working on are filmed, videotaped, whatever the right term is now. You know, Super 8. Yeah, Super 8.

Filmstrip. They're video shows that you can listen to as an audio feed on a podcast and you can consume most of it on YouTube. In fact, YouTube is now the most popular podcast consumption platform according to Edison. So you're making stuff once and distributing it multiple places. For sure. That's the idea and to maximize the reach and the monetization across both of those platforms and ultimately hopefully more than just two platforms or three or whatever there may be.

It works differently in that on YouTube, Google sells the majority of the advertising that's not being sold by us on behalf of host reds, you know, for host reds. Whereas in podcasts, we have a choice of what

we can plug in to allow us to sell that programmatic inventory. So we work with Spotify and Span in some cases. We work with SiriusXM in some cases, iHeart in some cases. And that allows us to see everybody and see who's really killing it and who is not. Because these are podcast networks. There's advertising networks that can sell ads regardless of where you listen to the podcast. Correct. Exactly. So the monetization works differently and it's our job. And one of the reasons our clients pay us tax

absolutely optimize that across all these different platforms. What's most valuable to you right now, a podcast listener or a YouTube viewer? So a podcast listener, if they subscribe to the podcast feed on Spotify or Apple, is the most valuable because they're the stickiest. They spend the most time with a given show. There's automatic downloads in both the case of those two apps. And once they...

follow or subscribe or whatever the current parlance is. They're going to get every episode. They're more likely to stick with us. They have more lifetime value. They haven't pulled out a credit card, but it's almost as if they have. They've committed to you in some way. For sure. And then they start making a mental appointment in their own brain about how often is this show coming out? When am I going to make the time in my commuter, in my daily life to listen to this show? So there's really more of a

commitment to a podcast listen. Whereas on YouTube, it's still super valuable to us, but the people who are coming and watching on YouTube, 70% of those people are not subscribers to our channel. They're being recommended algorithmically. And the two concerns that I have about that, one is clearly they're not a big enough fan to have clicked the subscribe button, so they may not be as responsive to advertising, or they may watch one video and not the next. That's one. And two is

We've all gone through algorithmic hell in the past with Facebook and every other platform. The algorithm that brought you there is an algorithm that could not bring them there tomorrow. For sure. And so even though podcasts, it's not exactly we get no data when someone subscribes to our podcast feed, they're at least connected to that RSS feed and are likely to continue to get episodes until something like the Spotify thing happens where everybody kind of changes their mind again. But the... So the podcast listener has greater long-term value. Yes. Right now. Yes. Just in terms of like...

If you just stack them up today, you have a million podcast listeners and a million YouTube viewers. Who's going to generate more money for you today? The podcast listeners are going to generate more money because of everything we've talked about, that consistency of listening, the listening time, the loyalty to the podcast. And you can charge more for that. We can charge more. Advertisers understand that or? Yes. It's more effective for advertisers. Advertisers understand it. Now, YouTube is coming up fast.

both on the dollars that we're seeing from AdSense and Programmatic and the demand from advertisers for host-read ads in YouTube, which I think a few years ago was a little bit like, what is this? How do I buy it? And I think some of the agencies in particular would say, well, we represent that client for audio but not video. So that's a different pocket of money or it's a different person at the client or it's a different agency. Now there's a sense that

This is all the same thing. And so we should be spending on Megyn Kelly across audio and video. And therefore, we got to figure out how to convince our client to give us both pockets. Is Tucker on YouTube? I should know this. Yes. So, you know, a couple of years ago, I would have thought that Tucker Carlson would not be on YouTube, that he would have either unintentionally or maybe intentionally done something to provoke them and maybe wouldn't be kicked off and he'd be demonetized in some way. Yeah.

What's your sense of the YouTube stance towards your clients and just people who they might have not wanted to work with in 2018? Has that changed? I'm not sure how much it's changed. I mean, I listened to your podcast with Neil Mahone, the CEO of YouTube.

And, you know, he was pretty careful about his answers on those questions. I'm not so sure that if we had COVID 2.0, they wouldn't do exactly the same stuff they did during COVID 1.0. They're pretty reactionary to government interference and they want to keep a very brand safe, you know, business. And that's paid off for them to the tune of $50 billion in the last 12 months. So I get that. I do think that, uh,

Again, Neil's careful and he's not saying this out loud. I do think there's a recognition that driving Megyn Kelly and Tucker Carlson off their platform is not good for YouTube and that we should at least be respectful of thinking about whether or not these people are saying something that I just don't like or whether they're saying something that really violates a policy or something like that. So maybe if I could give them credit, it's that maybe they're giving us a second look.

When Tucker was on Fox and when Twitter was not owned by Elon Musk, Tucker Carlson would take great delight in trying to provoke Twitter people, trying to get kicked off.

He'd say, I'm going to dead name someone because that's a ridiculous policy and no one knows what it means. And here I go. Doesn't seem like he's spending time trying to walk that edge now. Doesn't seem interesting to him now. I'm not sure. I wouldn't be so surprised if I didn't wake up and see something like that tomorrow. Tucker's his own person. Tucker feels like he's earned the right to create his own media company, to not be told what to do. He's also created a massive subscription business. So he's going to be plenty successful. And I would say that

kicking Tucker off YouTube will work as well as kicking Trump off Facebook worked. So we've talked to you for half an hour. We've talked about Facebook and YouTube and Twitter and X and regular TV. We have not mentioned Gab, Parler, Rumble, Truth Social, all of the would-be right-leaning slash conservative versions of these platforms. I don't hear much conversation about them when I'm not talking to you either. What's the state of those networks?

The most successful is Rumble. Rumble is reaching some amount of scale, both from those people who have been intentionally or otherwise kicked off of YouTube. This is a right-wing YouTube. Yeah, a right-wing in gaming, and there's some other things that they specialize in. But yeah, right-wing YouTube. J.D. Vance's most successful investment.

As a VC. So I think that there is a there there. Interestingly for them, the fact that YouTube has given a little bit of a second look to talent and that Elon has bought X actually may hurt their opportunity in the long term. There's no point in being an alternative. The thing that you want is already somewhere else.

Yeah, but I will say this. Maybe the reason that some of these things is happening is that there are viable third-party opportunities that keep these – the more mainstream companies a little more straight. And so we owe thanks to those platforms that are keeping honest these platforms. Do you think there is like a real place for networks that are specifically ideological right or left and just say everyone over here is on this side of the spectrum and that's what you can find?

Those things exist on television, right? It seems like they really have not taken off digitally. Is there something different going on there? Yeah, I think what's going on that's different is the value that a network plays for creators in this new world.

When I think about a network in linear, it's a function of the format, right? There needs to be some number of hours of TV strung together for 24 hours to, you know, put it on coaxial cable and to put it in people's homes or to put it in broadcast TV.

Clearly, just in the same way that iTunes changed the music business and it moved to singles and now Spotify has moved it to subscription businesses, YouTube has changed the video industry, television and soon movies, I think, to be more atomized. You're going for a piece of content versus an overall network. And I build my own network. I choose to watch

Megyn Kelly, and then I choose to watch a cooking show. And those two things wouldn't be on a linear network together. You might listen to a Peter Kafka podcast. Absolutely. I hope you do. So I think that the role of a network is changing to be the way – the company that does it best is Barstool Sports, who is –

a network only in name in that they're sitting behind these different shows. They're helping those shows, supporting them from a monetization perspective, from a production perspective, and from a growth and marketing perspective. But there's no 24-7 linear network. And in a way, that's really what Red Sea Ventures is.

That's not exactly what I was getting at. I was getting at, does there need to be a, because if I said you're a right wing podcast and YouTube facilitator, you'd say, no, it's not exactly what we do. We do a bunch of different things. But if I go to Parler or Gab, I know what I'm going to get. If I go listen to Pod Save America, I know what I'm going to get. It's pretty consistent. But you're talking about, you're finding your growth in sort of non-ideological massive scale places. Yeah.

Yeah, I think so. I'm trying to understand. I think there's a difference between a platform and a media brand, right? All I'm really getting at is maybe that the idea of an ideological network makes more sense sort of in old media where things are constrained for various reasons and maybe online you just don't need that.

I think for the most part, that's true, that people can choose what content to watch for themselves. It's a pull medium instead of a push medium. And therefore, no one can ever predict what the human brain will do next.

And the idea that you might watch, you know, Megyn Kelly and then listen to Peter Kafka, we wouldn't necessarily have programmed it that way. I talked to you before the election. I said, you know, how do you think your business is going to go depending on who wins? Because generally the consensus is the Republican candidate wins. That's less good for the Fox News of the world because they like sort of being out of power. There's more things for them to be angry about. Same thing on the left.

And you said, yeah, that sounds about right. But you also said, well, I am worried that the potential Harris administration would come after my clients or people in my world. But now we're in a world where Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen, the incoming FCC chair are talking about, you know, using different language, but they're all talking about the same thing, which is sort of punishing enemies, going after a censorship cartel. Does that give you any pause just as someone who makes money in media and presumably cares about free speech? Yeah.

Yeah, we'll have to see what happens. I'm a free speech maximalist. You know, I believe that people should say whatever they want to say and that we should all evaluate them for what they say, which is to say that if they say something dumb, I'm glad we heard it and we can decide that they're dumb. I don't support censorship against the right and I don't support it against the left.

I'm not so sure that that's what we're going to see, but maybe we will, and maybe I'll be wrong when I've been wrong a lot in the past. So I hope that they don't go down that road and that instead it's about being –

Misinformation is in the eye of the beholder. And, you know, if they're at least reducing the crackdowns on misinformation, that's a good thing. Or the crackdowns on what, you know, what they view as misinformation, especially when they're wrong, that's a good thing. But I definitely would not be supportive of them going after people they don't like, of course. I'm also not supportive of that. Yeah. That's good. Curious cultural question for you. We're interviewing you in New York. You live in Connecticut. You

I live here in the city, actually. Sorry. You're from Connecticut. So you're in the blue state bubble. Yeah. Do you sense a change over the last two weeks just in the way people are interacting with people who know what you do for a living? Are they interacting with you differently? No. My view on this is that the cycle of change post-election is extremely short.

If we remember post-2016, there was the absolute media mea culpa. Wow, we missed it. We didn't pay attention to the Trump people. We didn't pay attention to the flyover states. And we're going to hire a Trump reporter. We're going to hire a Red State reporter. And what ended up happening was exactly the opposite. They went way harder against him. The resistance formed. CNN became MSNBC lite. All those things happened.

That's going to happen again. There will be a very short memory that he won the popular vote. There will be a very short memory that actually right-of-center views are just mainstream views that the majority of people have and not this evil thing. And everyone will go back to their corners by January 31st. And prior to this, did people give – did people – I don't know if you're a cocktail party habitué. But when you're in a – you're walking around Manhattan. You're talking to someone and they ask you what you do. And eventually they find out that you helped Tucker Carlson make money. Yeah.

There's a range of reactions, but is there sort of a standard one you're used to getting at this point? Well, I'm smart enough after doing this for 20 years to maybe not start with. By the way, I work in that space, but I'm also proud of it. I'm proud of the business that we've created. I'm primarily a business person, and Red Seat Ventures is not a right-of-center company. We run a true crime convention called CrimeCon. We work in a lot of other spaces like Nancy Grace's business.

So – and we're expanding beyond politics overall. So that's the weasel-y version of the answer. The real version of the answer is, yeah, sometimes people are like, ooh. It's probably the parties I'm not getting invited to, right? That are the people who really hate me. But I do think that at a pretty high level, the executives, the money people, all of those people are generally pretty –

tolerant of that this is a business and that right of center content sells. For a long time in digital, there was a sort of hope or aspiration or people like me would think about it this way. Oh, you'd start off on MySpace and the next thing you're going to do is get into television or get into movies. And there are a bunch of people who have tried that. There's some exceptions.

But mostly that door is not swung that way. You're working with people who are going the other way. Do you think that's going to continue for a while, that you're going to be taking people who were prominent in conventional media – Barry Weiss wasn't on TV, but she was in The New York Times – and are finding new spaces online? Or do you think at some point it evens out and you're working with sort of native people?

online people as well. Yeah, I think we're going to be working with a lot of native digital creators. One of the things before we were sort of all in with YouTube, which we are now and all in on podcasting, we were all in with Facebook. And I had a little bit of blinders about YouTube. We were really big Facebook web traffic, you know, sell the programmatic ads and the direct sold ads and make money that way. And we did do that for several years.

And I remember going to LA one time and driving around on Sunset and YouTube had a campaign going, a billboard campaign going. And it would be this creator that you've absolutely never heard of that has like 32 million followers. And then there's like – you go to the next block and there's three more. And the YouTube-averse, as you and I have talked about, is so vast that –

We're really, we're focused in this space because that's where my relationships are. That's where my network is. And those are the people who keep coming to me. And I love that. But absolutely, there's a big universe of YouTube creators who could benefit from what we do. And we are absolutely going to go after working with more of those people. Chris Pelf, I've known you forever. This is the first time I've done this on a podcast. So thank you for coming by. I appreciate it. Yeah, thanks for having me. I appreciate it. And I'm not one to do this very often. So you had to twist my arm, but I'm glad we did it. It wasn't that much twisting. Thanks again.

Thanks again to Chris Baff. Years and years and years, and finally got to do a podcast with him. That was good. Thanks to Jelani Carter, who's producing and editing this show. Thanks to our advertisers who bring it to you for free, and thanks to you guys for listening. I can't say this enough. Thanks for telling other people about it. It's great when you text me or email me or tell me in person you like it. It's even better if you tell someone else. Okay, thank you again. See you next week. Support for the show comes from AT&T.

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