Meet The Podcast Genius Behind Chris Williamson’s Modern Wisdom | Ben Hancock

28:20Whereas if you love your audience and you want to hang out with them, then picking three guests a week to have conversations with that will also get you views and grow a podcast is far easier because he's consuming books and articles and studies that he enjoys and that the audience enjoys. And so I think that has really worked in his favour. That's so interesting because one of the things, again, that when I look at the show really impresses me and confuses me is the breadth of guests and topics and I was looking at a show yesterday with a client and she had made that mistake of doing episodes on like four or five different topics and then the ones that had all done really well were all around

29:21Callum:longevity and ironically that was the topic she's least interested in so she's then got this audience of 10 000 subscribers and let's say 8 000 of them have come from longevity focused episodes so how has he kind of balanced that creating around a few different topics and securing what seems to be like an audience where there is actually quite a lot of crossover is what is it for you that kind of pieces it all together because conventional wisdom when I'm talking to someone would be like stay more in one niche um you know just stick to the political stuff or just stick to the more philosophical stuff or just stick to the business stuff.

30:11So what is it that kind of like ties it together and makes that work? Yeah, it's a great, it's a great point. And I, so for Chris, I think it's about him, not to embarrass him by saying that, but I, you know, whenever we got feedback, people stayed because they liked the way that Chris was asking questions. And so you've got this audience of probably the kind of 25 to 34, maybe slightly higher than that, audience who are listening and are interested in these topics of fitness society, as you say, wide ranging topics. But Chris's view was always, well, if I like them, then hopefully that's a good arbiter or that's a good measuring stick of whether my audience will like them.

31:03that should be the goal. And that allows him to go in it because you get the best out of Chris as an interviewer, if he's genuinely interested or curious about the topic. And we know that Chris puts so much effort into the questions that he asks and he really studies these topics. I think that's a really important point. That's one of my points that we can get onto as well in a bit. So for me, going through those topics, if Chris likes it, people lock onto Chris, and it's the way he asks the questions. And I think that's something that can't be understated. I think it's almost taken for granted because you have a lot of podcasters who, like a lot of podcasters, even now, if you start a podcast, you can get probably about 50 to 60 % of the guests that Chris has had on, on your podcast, because they're people who enjoy going on podcasts.

32:01But the differentiator there and the reason people come back, because there's no format, it's an interview, right? There's no like format where Chris has a segment that he does every time. So they're not returning for that. And they're not returning necessarily just for the guest. They're returning for Chris. We saw this example, Callum, when we had some, whenever Chris has like in the earlier days left leaning people on. Like I remember he had David Pakman or people like that on. And when your audience is kind of US podcasty, kind of Republican leaning Joe Rogan fans, the people who came from Rogan, and they're listening to that, they're thinking, what is this crap?

32:39Why have you got him on Chris? And Chris was like, if you don't like this podcast, go. I want my audience to be people who are fine listening with things they might disagree with once in a while. And so if you go with that attitude and kind of retain that integrity, even if it's a slightly lower views, and don't get me wrong, you can have the luxury of that once you've built up and established an audience. But it's that whether once you get an audience and a taste of it and a taste of success, do you give in and try chasing that same audience for views or do you keep that authentic road? I think in podcasting, the authentic road is the slightly harder road, but it's the road that is also easier in the long run.

33:26Because as you've said, that's how you've built an audience that you love. Yeah. It's really interesting. I definitely see the personality stuff. Now you said it, it's like a personality led show ultimately, I guess.

33:39Callum:And there's plenty of examples of that where, yeah, you're just there for the personality and the host and you trust them and you like them um I do think as well like there's this kind of sentiment of deeper philosophical mind expanding type feeling that I get from the episodes a lot of the time um and it's like inquisitive and so I think that's that's also maybe like a strand which kind of ties it all together, even though the guests are from slightly different disciplines, and some of them are maybe more informational episodes than not. But like there is that kind of broader sense of which I guess is just Chris's personality that we like and we buy into.

34:31It's super, super interesting. What comes next on the list of principles? was? Yes, let's go for it. So I'm going to go with point eight on here. No researcher can or should replace an authentic, thoughtful conversation born of earnest curiosity, kind of similar to what we're talking about. However good the team around you is, the host must personally prepare well for each interview. I think this goes into what we were talking about as well is however much research we were all putting in to help it make a great conversation. The conversation was Chris's and he was well prepared every time for it.

35:11And I think this is an important point today in a world where kind of Chachi BT is almost creating our interviews for many podcasters. They're putting in kind of, okay, put this PDF of a book and these podcasts in and throw me out a good interview and maybe I'll add my thoughts. That's just never how it's been for Chris. He's reading the hard copy of the book or the Kindle version of the book. He's researching scientific and academic journals that relate to studies that have been about it. He's sending memes to his mates that correlate to it. Just the interesting circling of the topic of the video.

35:55And I think he really enjoys that, which is why it's helpful. But I think you've probably had this where there are certain podcasters, like I imagine you've seen this, where listening to it, you can almost tell that it's been prepared for them and they've been briefed on it. And then they deliver the interview. Whereas when you're listening to Chris interviewing someone, you're listening to Chris interviewing someone. And I think that's really important that's really interesting what what are the mechanics of like actually running this show um let's say if we went through them like guest booking who does who does guest booking at the early stage and then like at the stage where it's is now and what yeah what's the kind of rough mechanics of putting together a brief scheduling the episode recording editing it reviewing it like what what does a typical episode workflow look like or week look like yeah so when I was there in the earlier days guest booking was was all basically done by Chris So personal outreach and personal research he was doing.

37:23But then a lot of it was, so one of the tasks I enjoyed doing most every week was we had about 10 shows that I were, 10 shows and 10 websites and journals and things like that. But 10 shows that I would look at every week. And I'd basically see who are the guests out there who are doing the rounds at the moment, who's doing well, who's kind of interesting. that this person had on, that person had on. And I think a lesson that can be learned from this is we often look to the biggest podcasts to do that if you're a smaller podcast trying to grow. That was kind of the opposite for Chris. We had shows on there, like one of the shows we loved to research was called The Dissenter.

38:05And this is a tiny podcast that was done by a Portuguese guy. and he had academics on and they were really heavy conversations. And so that's one example where I'd be looking at these. And these weren't people with necessarily a following, the guests, but it was trying to figure out, okay, who's out there? The other element would be, we had great relationships that we had established with publishers. So we would get the publisher catalogs every season and see what books are coming down the pipeline and try and get in and be able to interview those authors. So there's those two. And then there's people, Chris was a big fan of Substack.

38:46So he would find Substack writers. I was trying to remember the name of some of them that we had on where Chris would text me and say, can you get an email for this guy so that we can invite him on the show? And I'd be like, who is this? Like the complete digital ghosts people who had written an article somewhere in the Substack ether that had little likes, but Chris had somehow stumbled upon it and loved it and wanted to have a conversation about. And so it was kind of a mixture of all of those things. And then of course you have a wish list of people who are just excellent guests. And so I would help Chris with researching topics and guests to propose to him, he'd have the guests he want.

39:32But at the start, generally, unless there was something where it wasn't dealing directly with them, then I could go in and begin that conversation. But most of the time, it was Chris personally outreaching. For the first several years, I think it was only about less than a year before I left Modern Wisdom that we actually hired a full-time guest booker. And when you're talking about three guests a week, three episodes a week, that is insane. But again, that just shows the dedication and obsession Chris had with the show, that we had the guest booker come in and then I would help with the guest booker.

40:13We would all help her pick up on how to sense check whether a guest is right for modern wisdom because it's not necessarily, you know, oh, this person's got a book. It was like, Chris wants to be able to have a conversation that he enjoys with them. So how do you, how do you get his consciousness into the mind of, of the guest booker now? So that was an interesting challenge that, uh, but she's great. She was a fantastic guest booker. It's so interesting because do you think that the host needs to do that in the early stages? because like how hard is it to secure these guests?

40:51Callum:Like does it have to be the host? If someone's listening to this with a podcast, should they be doing the outreach themselves to secure these guests? And second question, how much of the guests you're booking are outbound versus inbound? If you're enjoying this episode with Ben and want to implement some of his frameworks and principles that he learned building modern wisdom, I'm going to put a copy of all of them in my next email newsletter. So if you want to implement some of these frameworks and get a copy of them for free, sign up at the link in the description. Now let's get back into this week's episode.

41:28The first question about the guests that we were booking and Chris doing it, I'm torn because I don't think it was necessarily healthy for Chris to be doing it. I think it was probably quite stressful. but I think those are the attributes that made him get top eight on the global charts on Spotify, you know? So would I recommend that to everyone? I'd say if your ambition is genuinely to have the best podcast in the world, then I would be as protective as you could over it, knowing that like, don't water down your vision and your involvement. But I don't think that's necessarily the healthiest way to do it, a stress-free way to do it.

42:12And I know there are a ton of people that maybe don't have that ambition, just want to create a great podcast that performs well. And so that isn't necessary. But I mean, Chris has great relationships with a lot of the guests that he's had on. So there is that benefit of a lot of times, one of the great benefits of podcasting is being able to sit down with an hour with people you respect, like you enjoyed someone's book and you actually get to talk with them about it for an hour. That's really unique. Where else does that happen? So there's that aspect of it, of the personal relationship that has benefited Chris and he likes.

42:47The second question about the inbound and outbound, I would say from memory, about 90 % was outbound. And that's not that we didn't get an insane amount of inbound guest requests. But again, we were getting guests that Chris wanted to talk to. So it's really hard. It's more stars aligning if you have someone inbound that's like, oh, they've come inbound. And it was cool as a young guy still in uni when the podcast is starting to get some real traction and you start getting inbound where you're like, oh, I actually have heard of that person. That's really cool. It's quite novelty. But still, it wasn't really, it wasn't common that we would get an inbound and say, yeah, let's schedule that.

43:36It was, it was a rarity. It was more, let's pursue the people we really want to talk to. And we know will be a great episode. Yeah. I think there's definitely a lesson in that given the level of guests that you were able to secure and the novelty factor as well.

43:52Callum:In fact, that like a lot of these people hadn't been on podcasts or not been on that many podcasts before. Again, And it all just kind of points to probably like a harder battle in the long run. Because it's easy to book people who have been on all of the shows already and are top performers and outliers. It's easy just to copy. It's harder to be original in your choices. And certainly, as you say, like the personal touch and the personal outreach from the host is more difficult. but it means you're probably more likely to secure them. What comes next as a principle that kind of stands out? I think the next one I would go for is point nine in there.

44:41I was dedicated, obsessed with, and devoted to my work, but Chris was more so. If I missed anything, it was Chris who would pop up and remind me nicely. He cared and was personally invested in the success of the minutia. So this success of the minutia, we're talking like if I was a few minutes late on pinning the comment in the YouTube, it was Chris popping up and saying, hey, mate, would you mind pinning the comment, please? Just anything like that. Hey, mate, would you mind sorting the end card, please? or just all of the tiny stuff that, again, as you say, maybe that's debatable whether he should be involved in that stuff.

45:27And I would have done it just a few minutes later. I was probably doing something at the time. But it was always Chris there. It wasn't another team member. It wasn't a higher up or any. It was Chris because he was personally invested and personally cared. And again, I think that maybe has caused him more stress than is necessary over the years. But this was Chris's passion and he wanted it to be as perfect as it could be. And so that dedication and obsession, I learned so much from working with him day to day. And I think it's only because of that, that it's got to where it is. Um, it's, it was remarkable to observe the care and craft that went into everything that was, that was done on a daily basis.

46:13And just, I learned so much and I don't know how much of that he took from his nightclub promoting days, um, and creating great nightclub, uh, events for people and stuff. But it was incredible to watch. And I still think about that often the dedication obsession with podcasting, um, and, and the success that's come from it yes it's it's tough isn't it because i well we work with a lot of creators and we work with a lot of brands and entrepreneurs on their shows and some of them are pretty huge um and i do often wonder if that level of dedication and attention to detail is necessary to have those results and even even even building a team like you know do you think Chris is still doing that right now and how I mean maybe maybe it's interesting is like to touch on how involved in the week to week is he and what what does the process look like you know you're doing three episodes a week after they're edited is he watching them through like is he picking the clips is he picking the title on the thumbnail is someone like preparing all of that and he's maybe just like adding little thoughts on it um or is he just requesting record and then handing it over to the team and they're handling everything like

47:58Callum:what is the evolution there over your time with him? And do you think that level of attention to detail, if it is really involved, is necessary?

48:12Yeah, so at the start, when I joined Modern Wisdom, Chris was definitely involved in everything, every aspect of production. In fact, it's funny, Chris was still, for a few years after I joined, editing the audio on GarageBand on his laptop, which is crazy to hear. But it's because he would sit on his couch when he had his torn Achilles or ruptured Achilles or whatever. And he'd be recording on GarageBand his host-read ads for the start and a little introduction. And then he'd be getting the GarageBand and exporting it as an MP3 and uploading it to the host's website. So yeah, directly involved in everything.

48:57For the first few years, we texted every single day about operations stuff. And so yeah, titles, thumbnails, description, everything you could think of Chris was involved in. And that did start, especially as he's been open about his health struggles more recently. I think that was a great catalyst for him to try and step away. And sometimes it was hard for me as a young person wanting to do more and take on more responsibility, to be frank, and saying it was probably hard for Chris to let go of stuff and trust his kind of precious operations that he did, like even something simple like posting his Instagram stories for his advertisers.

49:44It wasn't until far down the success lane that I took that on and operational things like that, which is amazing. And we pedestalize it. But I think he also is at a place now where he's able to take himself away from a lot of that stuff and focus on the interviewing and hand that stuff off, which is great. And I think you can see it in his podcasting now. It's much more relaxed. He He looks a lot better. I do think that's for the best, but I also respect it. And I think that there's been a time and a place for those. And I think the natural thing is, I think it is a red flag if you start anything early on and you just instantly want to delegate everything and give yourself the easiest life.

50:34There's got to be, for success to cost so much in today's world, there's got to be a price you pay to get it. And so in business as well, in anything, in finance, you've got to sacrifice some things, compromise some things, pay a price and get it. However, definitely when we started expanding the team, we brought in a strategist, a YouTube strategist, who was able to then kind of support Chris in writing the descriptions and bouncing off ideas more with the titles and thumbnails. So it wasn't on him as much. We obviously handed over editing of audio and posting of stories and dealing with advertisers, all of those things.

51:18Chris had been doing everything himself involved in everything. And so it was handing those things off. And I think he'd probably reflect and say, yes, that is the right decision for him to not be so in the weeds at this stage but there's got to be a price you pay at the start to actually get it to that place yeah makes a lot of sense at the same time that's also the beauty of this medium i guess in many respects in that you record a podcast and yeah you like agonize over the title and the thumbnail and the clips and the edit and stuff but then like it is just there forever and with most of these episodes they are pretty evergreen as well so you might put a load of work into something but

52:14Callum:then it's just an asset that's on the internet and it's going to work for you for a very long time so it's it's it's worth it but also like the amount of work it it's actually not it's not huge right especially when you're at one episode a week when you're at three episodes a week and you're doing guest booking and doing all that like i can see how it gets to be pretty all-consuming um but the nice thing i guess is that it is high leverage and it compounds over time um and you've got that catalog there that's working for you. Yeah. And I think you'll get those people if you do delegate early on.

52:53There are some massive podcasts that I feel the person doing the podcast probably has little control or involvement over titles and thumbnails. And I think the result of that is you do then as someone underneath the host trying to make it great, you do then rely on the data, perhaps a little too much because that's where you're taking your success from. Whereas when you as the host are doing it, your success is not fully taken from the data, but there's a part of it that's like, I'm personally pleased with this according to my own kind of personality. And so I, yeah, I do look at some podcasts and think like, ah, you know, does the host really love that title and thumbnail are they proud of that um and you know i i i get the idea that chris is proud of every single one of the thousand plus episodes that are out there and uh maybe some of the old thumbnails that haven't been changed yet are a bit are a little bit cringy but uh i think he's he's proud of where he was relatively in podcasting knowledge yeah that makes sense let's come on to does is that where like enjoyment first comes in yeah yeah that so that was a great point um of um one of my things that i learned all aspects of podcasting should be enjoyable and uplifting um i think if if we weren't having fun chris had a problem with that uh he wanted the team to have fun you know that's that's why he i think flew us out to vegas for david goggins because I think it was worth celebrating the end of the year, a massive podcast.

54:40He brought loads of his friends together as well. And we had a great time. And even just before I left, when we had shoots in the UK, it was a massive thing of like, how do we make these studio things just really fun? Because it is a slog. We're here in a studio setting up really early, doing four two-hour recordings, heavy recordings in a day, all doing our functions during those recordings. I can talk about that as well operationally later on. And it was just, we just wanted to have fun. So that was always a major thing for Chris is I think that's what drove a lot of it. And that's why a lot of the conversations he was having, the studying of it, and he'd be bouncing ideas and stats and studies off with people like George Mack, who we both know and really respect and admire.

55:33And so him being able to have it be done in that way where it was never a lonely process. It was always a fun curiosity driven thing. And again, I speak to so many podcasters who are like, I've been doing this for two years. I'm exhausted. I'm not seeing any growth. what's the point of it all. And it's like, make sure that you're rediscovering the fun of it and why you did it in the first place. I've got my own podcast and I fall into that trap sometimes. And it's great to take a step back and see the fun of it. Of the other principles, Ben, what stands out? Yeah, point six for me was, it came from an end of year slash beginning of year memo that Chris sent to all of us.

56:19That was kind of outlining his vision for the next year. And I found it really inspiring and paraphrasing it. It kind of referred around this idea of the success of the new year coming on, being on the other side of cringe. Success being on the other side of cringe. I thought that was a great, very Chris Williamson way for him to put it across. is actually everything we were doing from this point was making sure that all of our innovations, all of our changes were not cringe. The guests we were getting on the conversations, because I think when you're at that point and you've got a bit more attention on you and you're trying to navigate where to go next, you can slip into that.

57:06And I think maybe I would define cringe in that sense as being out of touch. And we needed to make sure that we were still really, that what Chris really liked was also what the audience still really liked. We were still catering to that audience that we loved and not doing stuff because we had an increased opportunity and resources to do stuff that we couldn't necessarily do before. So that was a really important factor, I think, in success once you've established your audience. and you know maybe you become a bit complacent because you're not urgently you know putting out a fire of why aren't I getting any views now you are getting views um it's it's time to really stay

57:51Callum:true to to how you've got there how do you measure that because I totally hear it as something that makes sense and it's kind of like the rock band who you know they've had the two smash hit albums on the come up and then all of a sudden they've got champagne problems and the music doesn't sound is good anymore. But how would you actually measure that day to day? Yeah, I think something that was really important to us, dare I say it more important than any other metric that we tracked by, was the comments section. And I say that it was one of my jobs every single episode for the first hour at least, but also after 24 hours, after certain milestones, I would be in the comments gauging what the response was.

58:43And that was every single episode three times a week. Well, to be honest, I was doing that on medium length clips as well that we were putting out. So actually that's most days, if not every day, making sure that I'm aware of the comments. And Chris was never one. In fact, he would explicitly tell me, don't delete negative comments because we had cultivated hopefully an audience that, as I said before, was unreasonably reasonable. So actually, if they were putting a negative comment on a video, I could look at that and potentially feed that back to Chris if I felt it was important, but getting a good sense.

59:22And then I could kind of brief Chris every week on the audience sentiment. So that's one aspect of measuring it that was really crucial to us, especially when you're having like the first few years, we wouldn't have had someone like Ben Shapiro on because of how big he was at the time. But then you're getting kind of the Ben Shapiro's, the Piers Morgan's coming on and you're thinking, actually, these are great opportunities for the podcast growth and awareness that we didn't have before. but what do people actually think? Because we're approaching it in a way where we feel actually we can have a really interesting conversation with these guys, but is the audience just thinking, no, that's not for me.

1:00:03This is not what we want to hear. So it was really helpful to have that. Very underrated, isn't it? Just going with it. Because one of our clients, Ramit Sethi,

1:00:18Callum:he i mean he said he doesn't look at the numbers he definitely looks at the numbers but he he's one of his kind of manifesto points that he drills into the team is that he reads the comments and that's where he gets the sentiment of if he's doing a good job as a host and if the show is doing a good job and i think to your point earlier there are so many creators of podcasters who don't don't read the comments don't reply to the comments and that's where you lose touch with what you're creating and uh the outcomes and um again you end up on that slippery road where you if you don't have that marker of like the types of people who are commenting and what they're commenting then and you just look at the views then you end up creating stuff that starts to foster the wrong type of audience, the kind of junk audience.

1:01:17Callum:So I think that's really interesting, another kind of marker in this journey of not losing touch with your actual audience and actually engaging with them.

1:01:29Callum:What comes next? Beauty compounds? Yeah. So the next one, the penultimate one that I have is the worth of beauty is beyond purely its function, therefore create something beautiful. I know it's a bit flowery, but I think that was always a big value for us, especially at the start when you think of like, well, I think back to someone I admire, Roger Scruton, and I shared this quote with Chris back when we worked together and beauty as a value as important as goodness and truth. And so it was always, I mean, you can see what Chris is creating. Sometimes there is not a function to what Chris is doing necessarily.

1:02:12It's just because he wants to create something amazing and beautiful. And I think he does touch on that in what the vlog that he did with Matthew McConaughey or one of those vlogs is about this sense of we're trying to just create something beautiful and meaningful. And I think for people listening at the right time, the conversations that happen on the podcast are ones that they will remember for 50 years. This has always been something on my mind is, is I listened to a podcast and I'll, you get these podcasts every now and then that just stay with you. And it was kind of how many of those can we make?

1:02:51Can we, can we actually have a really good ratio to podcasts that stay with people verse maybe a forgotten about or just timely and don't last beyond that. um so that that was a something i really enjoyed doing because we did that when we're making the clips when we were looking at the studio when we were looking at the designs for for short for when we when we first did short form all of those things we were really dean and i really and chris obviously really cared about the brand in a way where we wanted to keep that beauty unadulterated and uncorrupted when the team expanded and when we brought new people in.

1:03:31And it was like, let's just, this is really precious. Let's keep it that way. Because we knew, we didn't know why, but we knew there was value to it. It makes so much sense. How do you... How do you do that? Yeah. Let's take short form, for example.

1:03:55Callum:You know, how do you preserve that? Because I think you work with agencies, right? On the short form side. So how do you make sure that the message of the podcast is not lost? The look and feel isn't lost. Like, how do you actually police that week to week? Yeah, this is actually a really great strategic kind of operational example with the whole running is touching on the short form. I think this is a really good exercise is we didn't do short form for a very long time. And the reason is, is that we wanted real control over the quality of the output. We wanted to ensure that everything we ever put out was the best, right?

1:04:38and so that becomes really hard and standards start to slip with short form because it's kind of another drop in the ocean you can kind of forget about it if one clip isn't good enough but we didn't we didn't really want to do that and so we didn't make the jump to do it and the idea of do we give it to an agency where we can't necessarily have full control of who's doing it and whatnot but then do we bring it in-house where that will end up taking a lot of our time and resources away and we'd have to bring in more people like operationally, how do you do that? So we got to the Ainshi perspective.

1:05:13And at this time, my role was content manager rather than just this kind of maverick personality across everything. And the designs that were first going up, and I think you could even scroll back and see them putting out the agreed design was this very kind of a couple of years ago, viral short style where the text is horizontal and popping up here and there. There are loads of emojis coming up and whatnot. And I hated it. I just, I felt this is wrecking everything that we've made. And so I was quite direct in sharing my concerns with what these kinds of guys we brought in had done. And I think I don't think anyone felt necessarily different, but it was that point of, we really need to take care of this brand.

1:06:08We've created something beautiful and we're about to add just tons of emojis and little images and stuff for retention to it. It's like, don't do that. So we stopped doing that. And from then on, every single piece of short form content that the agency we were working with produced, I was personally signing off each one. And sometimes, you know, even just the essence of spelling and things like really small things like that, when you're pumping out so many, we've just been careful. But even to the point of if a clip just didn't feel right, like it was like, I mean, nothing's wrong in it, but it doesn't necessarily, it feels a little bit out of place.

1:06:54So just personally signing off every clip, I was almost a brand champion, really, just making sure that was protected. So that's how we did it. And so we all worked on these designs that we were happy with. And then another smart thing that I think is a genius stroke that I still don't know if anyone else really does in podcasting is you have all of these accounts now who are kind of these small motivational accounts who take clips of tons of podcasts and just make these radical edits of them. You'll have seen the ones, some of them are really creative. Some of them are just, they put a black filter on and a really rough texture and some running music in the background and stuff.

1:07:40But we actually, we kind of found 150 or so of these accounts that had produced some good work. And we kind of started incentivizing the production of them so that we could have our brand aligned designs. But then if we saw that one of these accounts had done a really good edit, you'll see Chris will repost it on his account. So he's boosting these pieces of content from these really small creators, faceless accounts out to millions more people. And we found that whenever we had a big release, kind of almost working with them and doing that was a really great thing for kind of allowing us to have that side of content that was more viral focused, but also didn't allow, didn't mean that we would compromise.

1:08:33And actually on a few of them, Chris has even accepted collaborations on them. But I think that was a genius stroke from Chris, to be able to still get that side of things out content wise without compromising our kind of brand quality. There's so many interesting things in there because, so first of all, you're not doing short form until a certain point. What point was that? Was it, was it 1 million subscribers or something crazy like that? Yeah, I think it was something like that at least we weren't doing it seriously we might have just been doing the odd very random short reel but there was no real strategy until very very late on I guess a lot of people would say yeah and this is this is something which is is so interesting it's like the contrarian approach

1:09:26Callum:often wins doesn't it so you assume now in the age that we live in and if you see what bear of a ceo do or uh any of these big podcasts do you would assume that you have to be doing social and short form to send people to the long form but i remember i'm friends with simon squib's team and that's one of their things they said they they live and die by which is the format should just work on the platform so if your youtube show doesn't work on youtube no amount of choreform will save it um by sending traffic over to it it needs to work on the platform itself so that's super super interesting point and then more practically when you do introduce it maybe for our audience just give a sense of like the level of output because again this is one of these areas where you know our friends at Gary Vee will say you know you need to be posting 20 times a day on TikTok and you know bringing the winners over to Instagram and then you know have like the 10 five minute clips on Facebook and why aren't you posting on X and like you know there's so much you can do what does a top podcast actually do like are they doing like is your agency posting daily are they doing free clips a week like what are they actually doing yeah for for a while what I remember is so we didn't really post them on x we had a separate strategy for x that was posting just quotes or thoughts or tweets from Chris we didn't we didn't post kind of short form video there.

1:11:20TikTok, we were throwing everything at the wall that the agency created that we were happy with and kind of learning to see what the data was there until we would develop a different strategy on that. And it was always the kind of relationship stuff that worked best on TikTok. And then for Instagram and YouTube, that was kind of different. So Instagram and YouTube for several days of the week, there'd be a post going out twice a day, reels going out twice a day. Not every day. And so those were kind of four hours apart from each other, two shorts going out. And so it was a pretty basic thing for that.

1:11:59And that's going along with the carousels. So Chris's Instagram was really active. So he's got the stories going up from advertisers. He's got tour announcements, lead magnets for kind of his life hacks lists or books to read before you die, things like that. As well as his personal stuff too, he's making posts that he's just done a podcast with Joe Rogan. And yeah, in the midst of that, they've done it. Interestingly, there are what, almost 5 million subscribers now, and they've only just started a separate Modern Wisdom Instagram to post more clips on there. But I have the feeling that it was never a conversion piece.

1:12:43Whereas if you're not a celebrity and you're starting a podcast now, you kind of have to have that conversion piece to actually build awareness. But as you say, I think we did so well on Spotify specifically and Spotify and Apple, and we did so well on YouTube that we weren't really looking for a conversion piece. Instagram was always more the the personal brand or just putting fun, interesting content out there. Yeah, so it was never really a conversion piece, the short form, which alters the way you do it.

1:13:17Callum:I'm super excited to announce that this podcast is sponsored and produced by my own podcast agency, 7xContent. So if you want to create a podcast in 2026 or take your existing one to the next level you can reach out to us at 7xcontent.com or check us out at the link in the description i'd love to work with you the podcast is one of the biggest shows on spotify and youtube what are the fundamentals or the inflection points in growing on those platforms is it is there a content strategy is it that the podcast is shared a lot and it's growing organically is it that your click through rate and your average view duration are really high and that drove it kind of what do you see as the the key key points in terms of that growth and where you had the most success yeah so i i'll build on what i said before of of the obviously going on joe rogan was massive every time we went on there was huge but that's only one aspect of it right I think another inflection point was increasing volume from two episodes to three episodes a week.

1:14:25I think that was massive. And I really don't think that you can get in any of the charts now, or you can get in them, but you won't stay there if you're at once a week. And you can see that on, you know, people who don't have the time to do three, two hour episodes a week, which is just mental when you think about it. The people who don't have that, you see them doing most replayed moments on Spotify as an additional episode, or they'll kind of do a host reflection or kind of a 10 minute thing. So you can see that volume is a massive thing. And so for Chris, putting out three high quality pieces of content a week on Spotify was massive and really kind of spoke to Spotify and said, this guy's serious.

1:15:11And even more so on YouTube, you saw, I spoke to an ex YouTube employee recently who said, yeah, I remember being in the YouTube office and we were like, what is Chris Williamson doing with these medium length clips, these kind of 15 minute things? They hadn't seen it before. Of course, Joe Rogan had been doing it for 10 years. However, there was no real strategy to it. He was just chopping up the podcast and putting it out. I think what Chris was doing was different and really helped us massively increase that volume because now we were posting quality content every single day. And actually something that people, something that I still don't think people do, or maybe they don't recognize it is Chris is posting a medium length clip on the Wednesday and a Friday before the episode of that clip is released on the Monday.

1:16:06And I sometimes get asked, why are you posting clips from the podcast? But the clips are still in the podcast. So you've already watched some of it and it's like, yeah, well, they'll watch it again or they'll fast forward it. However, what you've done is you've made someone want to watch more. If you go on them, the amount of comments you get that are like, where is the full episode of this? And they would have to wait for it. And that building of anticipation was, I think, key to building our brand and getting that inflection point. So you've got the introduction of short form, you've got the guest appearances and Chris's personal notoriety increasing, you've got medium length clips, they were massive.

1:16:50And what I'll say, Callum, and we've talked about this, is the medium length clips were intentional. And when we were on in-person shoots, I would be sat live timestamping an episode as it's going. And Chris, you know, there are obviously sections of it that are just amazing that weren't necessarily planned, but will be taken as a clip. But I think a lot of the clips, especially our most popular ones, are intentionally put in there, especially when you see Jordan Peterson's opinion of Elon Musk. Like, you know, Chris has that quote. Elon says, my mind is a storm. What do you think of that, Jordan?

1:17:33Like, he knows that's going to be a fantastic clip. And it's not necessarily part of this natural conversation. It's put in there. It's a scroll stopping moment. It's a pattern interrupt. Same for asking Eric Weinstein during the election about Kamala Harris. Like, he knows what he's doing there. and those clips just are massive. So that was really exciting to do those. And he's been doing that for several years. And I think that's something that he always did really well. So the volume was massive. Chris was always massive also. This is probably the final point I'll bring up on this is he would send us the interviews like with Mr.

1:18:16Beast on Colin and Samir. And I think a principle he really liked was Mr. Beast's reinvestment into each next video. So Mr. Beast explains how the money he made from this episode, he will then put into his next video fully and he'll be broke and then he'll go on to the next. And I think Chris always liked that sentiment from Mr. Beast. So we weren't ashamed of saying, yeah, we've definitely taken an inspiration from creators like Mr. Beast and tried to transfer it to podcasting. And I think you see that in the cinema shoots, like Chris spent far too much money on some of those cinema shoots, but it really made us stand out.

1:18:59So that reinvestment piece, I think is massive as well. Chris putting everything he has cognitively, financially, physically into these podcasts. Like I saw how worn out he was after some of those shoots. And I admired it. It was great to watch a legend in person. And you knew he was like, I worked with Chris for four and a half years. I spoke to him every day. And yet I was still there at the start of it thinking, yeah, I'm working with a legend here. I'm working with a genius. There's so much to unpack there, Ben.

1:19:35Callum:the mid-length clips are so underrated in my opinion i think they are genius for so many reasons so let's just unpack a few things there so the first is that you're saying that kind of as part of the conversation and the brief you've kind of pinpointed what would be the most interesting kind of five ten minute answer that our audience would like to hear from this guest so you're kind of like pre-planning that as a segment or chris is pre-planning as a segment and then you're releasing it before the episode comes out to kind of create interest in the full episode that's that's that's essentially what's going on there as well as kind of just picking out like the best kind of substantive five, 10, 15 minutes on a topic from an episode.

1:20:31Yeah. Yeah. We're setting ourselves up for success. Like before a big episode, Chris would always send me to do a sweep of news. And we, we kind of had, we kind of had 10 to 15 trusted websites where we would find news stories that, that felt aligned to things. They were usually just funny things, but funny things that were really relevant at the moment. And then there were websites that kind of had articles and op-eds written about new psychological studies and a lot of academic stuff as well. And I'd be sending kind of a few days before an episode so that Chris had time to prep, I'd be sending him a doc with kind of 20 insane or very relevant or crazy tweets, news stories, articles, studies, blog posts from blogs that he liked and often gleaned things from.

1:21:29And he'd get all those things. So you've got this wealth of current and funny and edgy stuff to throw in there as well, as well as, you know, asking about Elon Musk. That's like guaranteed. And it's all stuff that the audience loves as well. You know, we're not going to do it if it's irrelevant, but it's stuff that our audience loves to hear as well. Yeah.

1:21:56Callum:I mean, we've run this playbook on high performance, which is a show that we work on, and we're running it with Man Alive, which is a show that you produce now. And the other aspect I love about it, which I think most people don't do, is like you've spent two hours recording a conversation and you've probably been trying to book this guest for weeks or months or years. And then you've invested in the studio or the set and you just post it once. I mean, it's just insane. you know if you can then get like let's say minimum two but let's say you get five good clips from it then you just are like sweating that asset and giving that episode a chance multiple chances multiple shots on goal so I think it's so interesting and I know we've also had experience of actually even just putting out the same clip multiple times and repackaging it and getting more life out of it or when something topical comes up in the world kind of six months later with that guest and then putting out like something there.

1:23:07Callum:So I love this because a lot of times I see people put out an episode and it doesn't meet the expectations, you know, it underperforms. But it doesn't mean it's a bad episode. It just means that the way it was packaged or the way we started it, you know, maybe wasn't as good as it could have been. But there's like probably some great sections in there that actually can get seen by tens or hundreds or millions of people if you give them another chance. So I love it. Where do you stand on having a separate channel? Because I know like Lex Friedman, he has a separate channel. Diary of the CEO, the team there, if you speak to them, they say, don't put shorts on your main channel.

1:23:55Callum:don't put 10 minute clips on your main channel you know just keep it to people who are interested in long the long-form conversation whereas chris kind of completely bucks that for the 10 minute i don't know if you put shorts on the main channel do you have any view on like the right or wrong there or yeah we i guess it's never been a a right or wrong it's it's what you want to do And for Chris, it was always keeping it in one source of truth. And that was always the case. And I know we've got friends like Alex O 'Connor, who does kind of a theology philosophy podcast. And he was kind of asking advice of us of, oh, I'm not sure whether I should put clips on my own or there.

1:24:41And there are different ways of doing it. I think if you want pure volume to put stuff out, then definitely go there. But for us, I think we were too protective of the quality of our output to just create a clips channel and have loads of stuff going in there. And if you're not having tons of stuff over there, then what's the point? And if you're making such good stuff, then keep it on your own channel. And we want to drive the traffic there. I think a big part I think a big part of the mid-length clips when done well is to diversify the audience that you're reaching on YouTube, right? So the same people who consume your podcast via the actual podcast, the long form, are not the same people who maybe will click on this.

1:25:32But well, actually, in many cases, it anticipated a coming episode. So they were excited about it. But for the people who would never naturally just click on a two hour podcast with not much context, then they're a great gateway to exploring the podcast more. And I think the view of, I mean, there was that worry for us of what if we oversaturate the notifications of our subscribers who we value. But then you're thinking like, how often do I pay attention to my YouTube notifications? and how often, like really I'm going on my homepage and YouTube knows what to suggest to me. So I don't think we got any complaints about putting a few more clips out on there.

1:26:19So I think it was fine, but I think it's totally valid if people want to do a separate clips channel. But for us, we wanted to keep it there. And if we brought people through a clip to the full podcast, then we wanted it to be really easy to find that podcast. So you'd say, watch this. If you want to watch the video that's coming out on Monday, press subscribe. If you subscribe to it, then you'll be able to then see this. And also we want to redirect them to the newsletter, where again, they'll be told about the podcast. So for us, it made sense to keep it in one central hub, but I can totally see for others, especially those with massive teams where they're just pumping out tons of great clips, then go for it.

1:27:02But they always feel to me a bit more like drops in the ocean rather than an intentional kind of awareness campaign of leading up to an episode where I'd want to keep it all in the same place. Whereas if I'm just looking for like add revenue from a money standpoint or pure awareness, then yeah. But I seldom get clips channel things propagated to me by YouTube. So I can't say that I've experienced the major benefits of that side of things for myself, but I'm sure that others have and could argue a good case

1:27:45Callum:against me yeah I personally think that YouTube's algorithm is so smart and they're designing the platform in a way that one channel works and you can put anything there I I do believe that and my experience is that let's say you followed Chris for example if you just watch the vlogs YouTube will just show you the vlogs if you just watch the long form it'll just show you the long form. The same with the mid-length clips. YouTube will show you what you're interested in based on what you've previously watched. And I think it's so smart, the algorithm are only getting smarter. That's why as well, we changed the name from Modern Wisdom to Chris Williamson too.

1:28:31YouTube channel for the first several years was Modern Wisdom. And then we decided to change it to Chris Williamson because it housed all the content. And as you say, it didn't really matter. That was where our content sat. We didn't need kind of a more Chris Williamson channel over here and all of that. It didn't make sense for us. Yeah, it makes sense. I think the only one that I do worry about with clients is shorts on the main channel

1:28:58Callum:because it depends very much on who your audience is. And I've found it worked really well with younger audiences converting from shorts to the long form videos. but certainly with with some other channels i've seen definitely like a negative impact on on the channel where maybe like the short people watching the shorts it didn't quite align with the right audience for the long form so like having that congruence throughout all your content and and who it's a good fit for i think is is important if you're going to put shorts on the main channel um there's there's one thing we haven't touched on which is pretty fundamental to all of this and i'd love to get your take and that is monetization because it's all very well plowing away for years and years if you don't have uh any income it's very hard to do that and the level of execution that the show is now at is probably very hard to replicate if you're not making money so i'm interested in you know how a show like modern wisdom monetizes and what you think is kind of the best way to monetize a podcast if you want to create something similar.

1:30:21Yeah, I think Chris was really well suited to the prospect of monetizing the podcast early on because before he was a podcaster, he was a professional model and a promoter as well. So I think naturally promoting products was a great fit for him. And I think he got to the point where, um, it wasn't just flogging the products because he still was working until he didn't need to work anymore. And I think that came through, um, having deals with brands where he actually used the products. So I think I I'm sure one of the first, probably not the first, but one of the first deals with was with like crafted the necklace company that I know you're familiar with the people there.

1:31:09But the thing is Chris, Chris wore crafted and he probably still wears crafted. I remember he gifted me for Christmas, loads of crafted stuff. And I was, I was grateful, but I, I'm not really a necklace kind of guy. It's not my style, but I was grateful for it. And he was a great believer in their products. So even now, when you look at Chris's ads, they're usually companies he's been working with for years and promoting their products for years and products that he genuinely loves and uses. So I think he's really well suited to that. If you were trying to replicate it, I think it's the same. I think it's don't focus on the brand deals at first.

1:31:54Focus your time on the podcast. And then when it's time to think, actually, I think I can start taking this on professionally. If you're following Chris's playbook, that is obviously there are multiple ways of doing it for different niches. But if you're following Chris's way of kind of a personal, personality led podcast, then yeah, establish that audience first. And then I think for Chris, a big thing at the start was a lot of his guests had books on. So it was seeing the opportunity to get Amazon affiliate links for things like that. So if people bought a book, then he would get some commission from it.

1:32:32VPN, things like that. We actually used VPNs. So back in the VPN golden age, that was a great way to kind of get some first dollars in from the podcast. And then it kind of grew from there. We didn't do merch for the longest time. In fact, I think it was only a few months ago, they released their first merch, even though we've been developing it for ages. It turned into basically brand deals and sponsorships were the key thing for modern wisdom. And I think that was Chris's kind of bread and butter. He was good at that. He knew what he was doing. And then you get into live shows and things like that.

1:33:14We tried some kind of membership things, but they didn't ever feel massively right for us and what we were doing. so it really did stick to the memberships and the ad revenue from YouTube because we put so much out

1:33:28Callum:there on on YouTube that's a great overview and I actually I've got I've got some of the merch and I can I can I can vouch for it it's really good it's really good quality I'm impressed

1:33:43Callum:what do you think is the best way then let's let's say let's say you are a podcaster and you're looking for sponsorships you can you can try and partner with you know three or four brands and they're your kind of headline sponsors you can sign up to an ad network like a cast or one of these guys and they place ads on your audio rss your your your apple and spotify feed you can kind of just take inbound sponsorships kind of episode to episode do you do you have any takes on if any one of those is preferable

1:34:38I, it's, it's hard for it to not be a case by case basis, but I mean, this was the benefit for us of doing like mid length clips is if you had a deal with a brand to say, I'll get you this many impressions for this amount of money, then we can, we can look at our inventory of mid length clips going out and saying, oh, well this Eric Weinstein reflecting on the time he met Jeffrey Epstein and what his impression of him was, uh, that's going to be a huge clip. So let's put a big sponsor on that one and get that and be strategic about it. So I think almost reverse engineer it and be realistic with what are the best results you can get out of your content and then pair that up with the different revenue streams available.

1:35:21And I think definitely for some channels, I think something that Chris did that was really smart was he had these kind of PDF lead magnets that got people onto the newsletter. And then And by doing so, like genuinely things that people, he spent a lot of time developing them, you know, a hundred books to read before you die. A lot of work went into curating that list and it was genuinely something that people wanted and it got them onto the newsletter. And the newsletter is something Chris has done for years, every single Monday. And he's built a massive audience on that newsletter through this intentional strategy.

1:35:58and therefore now you can say, I can get your brand in front of this many people on the newsletter with a link here. So I think reverse engineering it and finding what's best for you because Chris isn't doing personal coaching sessions. He's not doing consultancy. If he was doing that, then I think there are different ways you can go about it. But it leaned to his strengths and I think that's the best thing to take away from it is, is what are the strengths of your content? And Chris was someone, people in the audience loved and looked up to and enjoyed following. So they're going to want to consume the products he buys, wear the things he wears.

1:36:39What is the same for you? If I have a podcast, I have a religion podcast that's very niche. And so I don't think people are going to be looking to me for style advice or what hair gel I'm wearing that day or something. But they are interested in the books that I'm doing, or we do some tours to historical sites or stuff. So I can look at my monetization strategy through that lens. I think that's much easier and much smarter to do and actually can build you a very visible path to earning some really good money on your podcast if you look at it through that lens. Yeah.

1:37:19Callum:Just lastly on that, so would a podcast like Modern wisdom would they sell ads themselves directly with partnering with brands is that kind of a a better way to kind of manage that and own that or would they partner with like an a cast or someone like that and and have them place loads of random ads on on the audio because from my in my experience it they're they're they're all kind of like original ads where it feels like there's a direct relationship between Chris and the brand, which certainly, again, just makes it feel higher quality than like some of these podcasts I listen to. And there's like random adverts that aren't really linked to the show.

1:38:04Callum:Is that correct that it's more of like a mostly directly sold? Yeah, yeah. Like I can't emphasize this enough for anyone who may be slightly skeptical. cool. Chris uses the products he advertises. These are very commonly, I think now that it's scaled to a level where there are people involved in helping broker those deals and looking at different deals that are available for sure. However, when you see Chris doing a cinema shoot and then he's interrupted to do an ad where people are throwing venison sticks at him and he's saying, hey, get these venison sticks. He eats those venison sticks. And the reason he's advertising them is because he genuinely consumes them and will know the company and will speak to them and will have a deal that's beneficial for both of them.

1:39:00And I think people really respect that. And it's why you don't see certain brands perhaps on there because he thinks I could probably make a really good amount of money by advertising this particular brand or whatnot, but I don't use them and I don't particularly, I'm not particularly a fan of them. So I definitely, I would definitely, if you're in a position where you can do it that more holistic, genuine, authentic way. And yeah, the ACAS stuff, I think it's good for earning your first bits of money. I don't think there's any shame in doing that, but once you've got to a point where you can broker some deals, I think opt for that slightly harder, but more beneficial route than just sticking with, with the ACAST or Spotify ads or, or whatever that is.

1:39:52Callum:Yeah. I think that's great advice, Ben. Really solid advice. I think there's one more principle that we haven't touched on, which is interviewing as a craft. I had my nine things that I learned from Chris. we've gone through eight of them. And the final one was interviewing as a craft and a form of artistry. And this comes from a phrase that Chris always used was that being a podcast host is being a vibe architect. And I think he was really good at that. And he knew his role. Like you'll see now when he opens an episode, it's opening with like a really direct question. And I think that's quite exciting for the audience.

1:40:33It's also exciting for the interviewee, they're being challenging. And I think when you have an author come on, I think modern wisdom is a different experience for them because they almost don't feel like they're just promoting their book on a circuit. I think when they go on modern wisdom, they're really being cognitively, intellectually challenged about their book. And that's quite stimulating for them to think, here's this guy. First, he looks great and he's in great shape. He's a great kind of like host, but also these questions are genuinely really good questions and have got me thinking.

1:41:15And I'm trying to apply all the things I've learned to put into this book that I've written and apply it to different scenarios and really stress test it. And that was a criticism that Chris often got was that he wasn't pushing back enough, but he was like, I've got them on because I love this book. I think it's a brilliant book and I want to get the best out of it. And so there were sometimes criticisms that he didn't push back enough. And I think he started doing that a lot more, but he was coming from a place of earnestness, but he knew what he was doing. He had vocal coaching to ask better questions.

1:41:54He had comedy timing coaching from professional comedians to work on delivery of questions and interjections and things like that. There's a world of work that goes into the interviewing craft that people may not realize and think, well, it's just about asking interesting questions. There's far more to it than meets the eye. And I think this is something, the discreteness of extra work goes into a lot of things. Like I was speaking to a dentist who worked on Margot Robbie and she said, the best dental work is the stuff that you couldn't tell they've got dental work doing. And I was once with Chris, funnily enough, at Jimmy Carr's birthday party or a party.

1:42:39I think it was his birthday pie, but I, there I met one of Jimmy's coaches who was coaching him on, and I was thinking Jimmy's one of the most prolific comedians on the planet. Um, and, and he's definitely, you know, constantly working on his craft as well. And so I think sometimes we forget the work that goes into these crafts and for Chris interviewing is, is definitely that.

1:43:05Callum:yeah you can tell you can tell and the way he tells stories you know there's that famous clip the parable of the mexican fisherman yeah yeah i think that's i don't know if it's like 10 million views or something like that but there's there's multiple of those now where brisk tells the story impeccably well and you can tell that he's he's done thousands of podcast episodes um but yeah that's that's probably the side of it that people wouldn't clock is is the the coaching and the training and the like constant improvement and desire to be better um i think he said the other day he does screen test um for yeah i heard that i heard that show as well so you know who knows where we end up who knows where we end up but definitely there's there's a there's a craft there's a craft to it and um yeah i think we know some of the coaches so um yeah yeah they're they're they're really excellent people um so very maybe often underlooked in this world of optimization and this hack and that hack I think there's so much here in what that show has become that is just built on the foundations and the fundamentals of is the host actually a good interviewer?

1:44:35Callum:Is the guest selection good? Is the research good? All of that stuff, which maybe actually gets overlooked nowadays. cool ben if someone is listening to this and they're thinking i want to replicate what chris did and built a build a podcast do you think that that is still a good idea in 2026 is there still an opportunity in podcasting what would you tell them the really good question that I I've been grappling with my with myself um for a while I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on this too is is I do wonder where the barriers to entry are now in terms of someone going in and if you purely have consistency and excellent quality but it is in its core interview show can can you get there because for me I feel like at the moment when I'm developing new shows, a lot of it is about the format of it.

1:45:43Where is the format? Or rather than that, it's let's try not to capture the niche. Let's not try to capture the general populace out there and get into the general conscience and focus on a particular niche. So that is something I grapple with. And even myself, I worked at Modern Wisdom during uni. I had worked on podcasts before, but I got into there. And now because of the declining TV industry, you have a lot of TV execs also trying to get into podcasting. And so is there room for that same young, energetic, high agency generalist maverick to go in and build a fruitful career in podcasting?

1:46:27I think it's harder to do that, But I'm really worried about that because I still, something I love about podcasting is the edge, is the freshness of it. And you're seeing more and more shows like Holly Willoughby's new show and stuff where it's like, no, this isn't podcasting though. Like I get that it's good and there are people that will enjoy it and that's fine. but uh i i i miss this kind of edge about podcasting that i feel we're we're losing it we need to make sure that young exciting talent can come in and i'm not saying that was me but i'm saying that i still want people to come in and have a go and for it to be a little bit messy and to be kind of cringy at first and then to come through that and build something amazing that has like global impact.

1:47:19That's amazing. Can that happen? I don't know. I still think so, but you're battling against a lot of celebrities and big podcast production houses now. However, at its core, I still think if you go and you work incredibly hard at finding your kind of spot where you can contribute and build an audience around you, and you ask genuinely brilliant questions about a topic that you genuinely care about, I'd love, because I think you've either as a host, if you want to break through, you've either got to be the expert in your field or the most passionate about it. I think you've got to be one of those two.

1:48:02Then I still think you can do it. And I think we're seeing a couple examples about that now, as I mentioned Elliot Buick at the start. I think there's a reason why Chris likes him and shouts him out quite often because I think he's giving a little bit of hope that you still actually can do that. And we'll see where that goes. And I think we're seeing the same as well, creative people with creative formats. So it's an open-ended question. And I think there are definitely ways to succeed in podcasting. And I really hope that we still can do that and it can still be this edgy, fresh medium. I don't know what you think about that though, Callum.

1:48:47Callum:I think there's a world of opportunity. I think we're still so early and everyone forgets this all the time. We're still so early in the collapse of traditional media and the rise of direct creation by individuals. If we look at YouTube as like the number one streaming app on us televisions it's insane the opportunity that there is right now for anyone to start a show and have success on that platform and be seen in every household in the us or in the uk or anywhere in the world and the same is true on on spotify and apple um we're still very very early and i think you're also seeing like the collapse of seo and blogs and websites and this kind of stuff and so i think you know every company will have a podcast and most people um creators um your your traditional kind of journalists and media people like they'll have podcasts and shows um and so i think there's this huge opportunity um that being said you're right the market is being flooded um i think the amazing thing though is it's being flooded by people who have no idea what they're doing and they're used to working in tv or media and so for the young and hungry people who maybe get these platforms or can learn them very quickly i still think you know the world is your the world is your oyster i do think though very much like chris innovated with the big in-person production sets.

1:50:35Callum:I think I would innovate away from, away from like, you know, your sit down interview show. I would think more the next phase is like TV, traditional TV, but remade for YouTube and the TV screen. I think that's where the real opportunity is. I think there's lots of opportunity in podcasting, but I think if you wanted to skip the competition, the blue ocean is kind of video first shows um and i think bris is maybe a great example of just not just thinking in terms of creating a podcast it's just creating a world and uh and a show first and then kind of thinking about the best medium to deliver it and create it so So with him, it's obviously a podcast and it's a newsletter and it's a vlog and it's shows, live tours and stuff like that.

1:51:32And I'd maybe think more in those because I think, yeah, the lines will blur between what a lot of the big podcasts are now.

1:51:44Callum:I think some of them will evolve more in that direction. And there's people like Rich Roll who are starting to do these spin-off kind of almost like TV series adjacent shows. So I think that's where we're going. And I think if you wanted to just skip, I would just skip the podcast straight to the next phase. Yeah. Which is interesting because that's a lot of what we're doing now. Maybe do you want to talk a little bit about that? And I still think probably the biggest opportunity in podcasting is more so where a lot of these experts, Andrew Huberman's a great example of it, just go direct in terms of creating, which is interesting because that's a lot of what we're doing now together.

1:52:41Yeah, absolutely. I think something that came to me as you were speaking there is this principle of your Jay Shetty's, Mel Robbins, Tony Robbins, Chris even, not to offend any of them, Stephen Bartlett. They're not old. They're by far old. They're still quite young, but they are getting older. And I think they take their audience with them. I think the audience grows with them. And so as they go on and on, and I think definitely all their content that I see, it probably is more for the kind of the thirties to 44 age bracket now, which leaves this ever increasing age gap of people where it's like, okay, who's going to be the next generation of these podcasters?

1:53:32Who's going to seize the opportunity? And I think we're creating some really cool things. Like I'm, you're my boss. I'm at 7x Content, working with really exciting branded clients and creators, creating shows for them that, I mean, I'm working on the health show Man Alive, which is just a completely original format. It's really video first. It's broken through so much on socials and it's got kind of things that bring you back every time and these innovative formats. I definitely agree. I think these are the things to look for now. Who's going to step in, in the ever increasing kind of gaps that are being left for new people to come into and fill with the best ideas with the next generation.

1:54:19I think that's where podcasting gets really exciting.

1:54:21Callum:When you look at the space, Ben, right now, who are you looking to? Who are

1:54:29I think, who am I enjoying? I'm, like I said before, I'm a big fan of these formats. I love seeing the new formats that are coming. So something I'm particularly interested in is watching how people, how celebrities are transferring into podcasting and who's doing well and who's not doing so well. And I've seen some of the interview shows that really have kind of flopped. And something I really like, this is a bit cringy to say, but I love what Ant and Dec have done. I think they read the room perfectly when they decided to jump into podcasting. It's just 100 % audience engagement. I think that's so smart to move into TV where no one can access them, into this whole world where they're on the phone with the audience now.

1:55:18I think that's genius. And I also love the overlap. I was a big football fan. Their acquisition of Mark Goldbridge's channel to create a club specific thing where you've got Mark Goldbridge and Wayne Rooney talking for an hour, that is a stroke of genius. And podcasting wise, I think they're doing what we're talking about where it's video first, but it's not TV. It's the TV in terms of the punditry, but you also see them coming into the bar and chatting. That's what we want to see. I think what they're doing is really smart. They do the fan debates to where it's Jamie Carragher and another footballer in front of just 20 fans just having it out.

1:55:58So I love these kind of channels. They're the ones that I consume. But personally, I'm a comedy fan. And so I love my comedy podcasts. And I think podcasting is a medium that has revolutionized how comedians can make a bit more money than just purely touring. So I'm all for that and what it's done for that industry too. Yeah, it's incredible, isn't it? I mean, we work with um parenting hell which is a top top 10 comedy podcast in the uk and just the ability

1:56:29Callum:for those guys to make a living by staying at home and not having to tour constantly you know that's just like game changing for that industry uh because it's a brutal industry on stage every night up and down the country up and down the world incredible and i think that kind of builds on the point that you made around what's next or what's coming next i do think these formats where their video first and it removes the barrier and it's just less constrained than television and so i i really like what the overlap have done i think that's great because it's just it's just not as stiff as a tv show it's just totally relaxed and i think parkson's farm is a great example of a show which it lives on amazon and it's got all the production of amazon but i think that show would work if it was just one camera guy on the farm vlogging it and putting it out on YouTube and I do think that there's there's big opportunity for people and brands and and creators to do more of that type of stuff and I I think that's where I also think this huge opportunity is because you then see the crossover of these shows starting to get to get commissioned for TV for Netflix for Amazon and some of them you know like Stephen Bartlett will say no I'm not interested I'm good being independent and doing my own thing others like Jay Shetty will say yes to a deal and you know make life changing money um and and and others will just you know live on all of those platforms in slightly different different ways and i think that's what's so exciting is the barrier to entry is pretty much zero and it's just down to who can create the best stuff which is which is is scary but also super exciting compared to you know where this industry was 10, 20 years ago and locked rooms and gatekeepers and who you know, not what you know.

1:58:37So I'm super bullish on it. This has been absolutely amazing, Ben. I've loved it. And I think the audience are going to love it. If they want to get more from you, where can they find you? That's a very good question. I do have LinkedIn and I'm active on there, Although I'm not posting, I'm usually just scrolling. But I love to chat to people about podcasting on there so they can find me. That's probably the best place to find me professionally with my podcasting stuff.

1:59:09Callum:Awesome. If you enjoyed this episode with Ben, I think you're going to love my episode with Grace Andrews, who was one of the early hires at the Diary of a CEO and built it very closely with Stephen Bartlett. It takes a different angle to Ben's approach to growing a podcast. and I think they balance out really nicely. So if you enjoyed this episode with Ben, go and check out my episode with Grace Next.