Jimmy VS The Producers | Christmas Special

0:00Right, well, welcome back to the final episode of Jimmy's Jobs of the Future for 2025. we had so much lovely feedback on the episode of Jimmy versus the producers we have decided to rerun it as a recap episode for this year but Sonny do you first want to explain what your job is yes I mean feedback I got from last time was that I didn't do enough sort of explaining and sort of letting the audience know what is actually going on my name is Sonny I produced the show I've produced the show for about three and a half years with varying other team members involved and I essentially do the dirty work would you say that's fair what making me look good make you look good but I do the sort of grubby negotiations with various guests and sponsors and things and occasionally book a guest but that is few and far between hopefully next year that will obviously increase um what do you think makes an ideal guest um I actually before we sat down just now uh i've got a gpt model that helps us with our thumbnail testing and in that model it has transcripts of the last 50 or 100 episodes and i actually asked it what are common themes that all of our guests have that we end up using for the title the thumbnail the topics and it said the biggest theme across all of them is dismantling popular myths right that apparently is a theme for our guests so politics doesn't mean do this it means do that business entrepreneurship isn't just about that it's that that's interesting it's kind of vague yeah so i'm slightly more equipped than normal to um say what makes a decent guest but it's normally that i think if they're sort of in the media in the spotlight that that helps and the sort of myth of tv is dying seems to have slightly turned a page.

1:56Don't you think that's quite a lot of recency bias in terms of that's just what we've had on the last couple of months? That's true, but I'm also basing that off Tim Campbell from The Apprentice, who seemed to do quite well. Yeah. And also just the fact you're hearing more about Traitors, which is a show where the celebrities are pitted against each other, and I'm a celebrity. I feel like I haven't heard that much about TV in years, as much as I have in the last few months. So, what about you? How's wait what am I asking you? Christmas parties? Yeah because you've got to chuck that to me. Okay.

2:29But anyway in the sort of light of reflections on this year what have you been seeing? What are your thoughts? Well I have been in reflecting mood. I mean I've basically had my first Christmas party season in what feels like four or five years because obviously I've got three quite small kids but I've got two small ones so it's been the first year that I've been able to kind of like get out much more to things which has been cool so i've gone to some great stuff and we've been invited as a team to some quite cool ones right we had john cordwell's kick it off um what a house he has at the end of november it was amazing like an amazing house amazing guests did you see the car lift in his house no that's seriously cool as well it's like a steampunk sort of car lift with an old school rolls royce going around in a circle it's um but it was nice and it was good to sort of like you know build a real relationship and i think we've been much better at that this year with like guests and teams and that side of things um and so on he's got amazing lady that works for him called megan who used to do rishi sunak's kind of um broadcast and i thought that was like terrific and great to see so many people there and then last week there was the kind of number 10 reception with alex the pledge and rachel reeves that was really interesting and I was sort of reflecting on our live budget event as well.

3:52So we've done a few different formats this year. And yeah, it was interesting how many people, because this is a pretty powerful room, right? It's like 150 of the most impressive entrepreneurs in the UK. And it was interesting how many had listened to our kind of live budget reaction with Alex as well. And so it's been quite cool trying some of those new formats and we're going to be thinking a bit about that over Christmas, basically, on background RAM, thinking what we might be able to do next year in terms of innovative formats and so on. And the episode's not out yet, but it will be. Jason Stockwood was talking about how we should interview a couple of people at the same time, maybe, which I think is also interesting.

4:34I think so. And then what other parties have there been? There's been... Well, look, I think the amount of parties we get invited to around Christmas time is a pretty good indicator of how well the year has gone. I was talking to a good client of ours recently who was asking why we aren't having a Christmas party. And my sort of response was, well, if you imagine a lot of the guests that come on sort of invite us to their various dues and parties. A lot of the sponsors and the backers of the podcast invite us to their various parties. A lot of our clients invite us to the parties. And then finally, all the PR firms who we haven't accepted, I guess they've pitched us, also invite us.

5:13So it's normally a good indicator if we're being invited to a lot of things that we're probably doing all right. We could have been at a party every night of the week. I mean, that is true in December. So you have to kind of... Well, you did a... There was one or two days where you did two or three parties back to back. Yeah. Yeah, so I did Strand Partners, who we've done quite a bit of work with this year. And then I went to the Octopus Energy Christmas Party with Greg Jackson and had this, like, amazing conversation with Greg Jackson, Rory Sutherland, and a lady called Imogen Bogle, who runs the fully charged electric vehicles YouTube channel.

5:48And so that was incredibly fun evening. And just, I mean, listening to Rory is always insightful. Okay. Fascinating. Okay. And then he hosted a lunch yesterday with John Evans. Oh, yeah. How was that? So that was the, yeah, I haven't actually spoke to you much about this. But so they did this lunch. John Evans, the uncensored CMO podcast host. She hosted a lunch with sort of the top 30 CMOs in the UK with Rory, and it was roasts and toasts. So basically, Rory was essentially, people were giving him things that happened this year, and he was either roasting or toasting it. Holly Tucker was there as well, actually, on the high street, who did a bit of work with her a couple of years ago.

6:36So that was cool. She made this amazing, or she got a company to make this amazing two kilogram chocolate turkey it was extraordinary uh so she sort of arrived that is who got to take that home then well i think rory was planning on sort of sharing i mean i had to get back to um pick the kids and stuff but it was it was still sort of going at 4 30 so um in the afternoon so it was it was a good lunch um when are we launching this episode is it going to be on christmas day i don't know maybe or maybe we'd maybe release it on christmas eve as people are prepping christmas eve okay well i always had like the idea of people listening to the show when they're making christmas lunch i don't know why i have that as a thing well let's let's take that and run with it i hope if you are listening to this you aren't too full on frere rochers apparently the um world record for the most amount of frere rochers eaten in one minute is 10, which I'm pretty sure I've beaten every year.

7:37But it can't be true. Apparently it's 10 because it's so thick. But anyway, I hope if you are listening to this on Christmas Eve or around Christmas, you're having a very good Christmas. And we would be very curious to hear what parties you went to in the sort of show notes, in the comments. And what makes a good corporate party or what makes a good kind of business party as well is a very interesting topic, I think. So I think that Rory lunch was exceptional. And then Olly Barrett and Michael Acton-Smith host a very good party each year, which has become a real calendar highlight. And that was this week, and you got to come along to that as well.

8:17So that was really fun. But what makes it... It's got to be an icebreaker, right? I mean, the party we went to had spoken they had what's that impressionist called again? Rory Bremner doing a very sort of interesting bit about politics being a horse race which obviously as soon as that finishes you've got something to talk about with everyone else in the room. Now with the Olly Barrow one they had the sort of photo booth in the corner roast and toast again it's giving the people in the audience something they can talk about free small talk basically A shared kind of thing. A shared experience.

8:58Yeah. And we're going to be having a big party in the new year because we will at some point go through 100 ,000 YouTube subscribers. I bloody hope so. I should do. May even go through on Christmas Day, which would be ironic. So the next thing I was going to go to is highlights. Beat points throughout the year that you enjoyed? Well, there's so many, right? I mean, it's like, I feel like the classics. So obviously starting the year with Tony Blair was fascinating. Being invited to number 10 to do Keir Starmer was brilliant. But we discussed that quite a bit on the last episode anyway. I think one episode I really enjoyed was our 200th with Greg Jackson.

9:40And it's been really pleasing to see how well that's done. Yes. Because for me, he is like the archetypal guest when I started this show. He's created more jobs than anyone else in the last 10, 15 years, 11 ,000 OXPG, innovating in lots of areas as we have worked on them with now. They're doing like solar panels, electric vehicles and all this cool stuff. And it was just kind of great to sit down with him for the 200th episode. And then it's done so well as well. It was just really pleasing because I think he's the type of person that we need to be championing more of. and is someone for entrepreneurs to kind of look up to as well.

10:26So that was a kind of a highlight. And you sort of almost forget now that that was a really big moment doing the 200th episode. I always think that a good measure of success in terms of sort of deep engagement, really having listened to the whole thing and taking it in, isn't always just sort of watch hours and sort of YouTube views or Spotify downloads. It's actually the amount of emails you receive afterwards where people related to the episode, they obviously want to come on the show, but they've specifically referenced that one. And I think that one is up there with a few of the others of being the most referenced when people are pitching themselves.

11:07So I think he's also a very relatable person. Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely. What about you? What about your highlights? I actually agree that we covered quite a lot of it last time. So I've tried to sort of be a little bit more holistic across the year. and one thing I noticed is we've been very good at nailing one thing at a time so I think I've sort of written here a timeline and I think back to what you said right start the year Tony Blair sort of getting into traditional media press coverage moving the national conversation we really had that I think early part of the year big focus on YouTube reaching a wide audience we had a few months where it really was flying i think middle of the year we started to build trust and people came to us with larger projects so being our production company being trusted to fly out to america to tell that story our podcast being trusted inside downing street and then i think near the later part of the year um it was social media flying we really saw big growth on instagram tick tock with some of our clips and i think right at the end we saw big growth in our production company in the amount of clients so you can sort of break it down into five odd chunks um and every sort of couple of months we had a different focus that we nailed and hopefully next year we can do more than one yeah at a time spin a few more plates yeah yeah no i think that's um i think that's true i mean it has been great working with some of the people to help produce their content and to sit down and I look forward to you know when you and the team go off to do a recording and whatever I look forward to it being published so that I can listen to it so whether it's like the likes of Bolton, BGF, podcast Steve Rigby I look forward to listening to what they've got to say and I think that's such a kind of like privileged position to work with people who are kind of ambitious about britain and creating really interesting kind of business entrepreneurial policy kind of content like is a real sort of real privilege to kind of do that i think they also enjoy our content which obviously makes it nice and i think that's pushed us the other big highlight i think near the end of the year is we'd produced more shows so we had a better context of what different shows look like so we use those learnings to innovate in our own show that's where you start to have the first episode of this jimmy versus the producers the live stream yeah i think that was a really nice move as well and hopefully sets the groundwork for next year yeah definitely and like we said earlier like it was surprising about people that listened to the kind of budget live stream and so on and that did go down particularly well so it's quite interesting on that side of things um I've got I'm dropping Jimmy in the deep end here um with something I have not prepped him before recording this but I'm going to do an informal informal internal box light Awards and I want to hear what your award goes to um the first award is what did we panic about unnecessarily this year what does that award go to have you got something in mind no no no not at all i i didn't want to think about it too much i wanted us to i i think one of our good attributes is that we generally don't panic yeah i think there's there's very little that sort of benefits from kind of panicking um um so i don't know have you got you must have something in mind for you i think uh we were a little bit more skittish when we'd when we did events so we've done a few events sort of whether they were public as jimmy's jobs events or less public and i think um it's just new for us right and i actually think all of them ended up going pretty well so we didn't have to be as stressed but you know maybe yeah maybe the stress is what made it go well but i think as we hopefully do more events next year we'll sort of look back and be like wow we really over engineered that i mean i just think they are though like they're you're always worried about yeah it's just kind of like getting right that's why i've got respect for all these people that do these christmas parties etc yeah that's fair but i would say for example something where we under panicked maybe is that day where we did three recordings back to back we'd we did sadiq khan we had a client recording for one of our other podcasts.

15:53And then we came back, did the founder of Substack. And I think the next day we did an event. And that one we weren't really that panicked for. It is weird how there's stuff like clusters, doesn't it, around things. Like it has, yeah, that was a nuts week. And South by Southwest was going on as well for the first time in London. So there was sort of quite a lot of sound around that as well. Okay, this one's less about us, but what do you think is a trend that died overall this year? a trend that died well Piers Morgan would say woke woke woke is dead I think it's definitely like a cultural sort of shift that's happening with a lot of that stuff but that's quite a big sort of question to respond to in terms of trends dying I mean I think one of the things is like the audio only podcast is definitely going despite the fact that we almost talked about doing this as audio only we did decide to put the cameras on for clips but yeah so i think it's um yeah what have you what trends have you seen that are going uh i'm not sure but i'm seeing more posts at the moment talking about how um because everyone knows about the m dash here's the new the five new ways of being able to tell if something's written with chat gpt yeah um so i think in that sense you're starting to see less polish on social media especially linkedin yeah um yeah yeah no i think that's that's true i mean i'm talking about skills of the future right i think brevity is going to be one of the most sought-off things the amount of posts i see now that just go on and on and on and i'm sure they're saying interesting stuff but It's like the TLDR, right?

17:41I think that sort of being able to be concise is good as he folds his book up. I'm going to slutty. Shift my position, yeah. That's the other thing I got feedback on for our last episode that I slouched too much. I've just only realized that about 10 minutes in. So there you go. Let me throw it back to you then. What else have you thought is worth reflecting on? well he's like you found that clip of me from last year at some point talking about how i really wanted to get to 25 000 watch hours on youtube and at the start of this year i was like let's go big let's try and get half a million which we've fallen short of just a little bit but interestingly now some of our videos have got like 25k on their own right so uh the great rory silverland uh obviously but that is it's kind of now thinking about like i'm going to do christmas with this because we've just been working flat out but it's like okay what's the goals next year right because it's easy to have like revenue and watch hours they're very specific but i think some of the conversations that we've had this year and the kind of like impact they've gone on to have have been really important it's quite hard to quantify that but i think that's kind of like you know thinking about that more about kind of like the influence and advocacy side would be really interesting yeah i mean that that alone is a very nice example of what it feels like to be jimmy's producer he'll go one week saying oh we should try and hit 25 000 by the end of the year and by the end of next week he's upped it to half a million i mean what that's just 20 exit just 20 exit and by the way i think that original half a million number was actually across all platforms yeah but i think you could make a case that we probably have hit it across all it's just on youtube if we're just youtube's the best with the analytics you know okay interesting um and then i don't want to go too much into goals for next year but um we might do a separate show on that we yeah we might do a separate show um but another big thing that we obviously launched um is community yes a space where people can get kind of more behind the show right like and listen to us talk a bit more find out about guests that are coming up uh and be kind of involved with sort of the planning of the questions and all that type of thing um because you we want to create an audience flywheel right like there are some people that are really interested in the show and what we're kind of doing and want to see more of how it kind of gets put together the research which guests we're going after how we approach it and all that side of things as well.

20:21So it's going to be interesting to do more of that next year. I'm really kind of excited to get to know the audience better and what they want by having more interaction with them because it's all quite piecemeal. Some of the conversation happens on LinkedIn, some of it happens in the YouTube comments, whereas this is just like a next level where people can kind of engage with you as well, right, like and understanding how it's all kind of pulled together as well so if you've enjoyed this episode that is definitely something you might want to have a look at yeah and i think a big part of the reason that we actually did go ahead and do that is because of the you know superb feedback we got you know even going back to the blair episode when we sort of added a section in the end of how that happened or you know the how the show is put together and where we make money yeah or like the starmer episode where we talk about the logistics a little bit and then yep the live stream the previous Jimmy versus the producers episode we did that audience feedback I mean really the live stream is a big one but that audience feedback made us think you know what we love that we love it even if it's three four hundred people telling us uh very specific feedback and that's why we went and did it and actually to your point right this is going out on Christmas Eve um if you haven't got your loved one a gift yet um the nice thing about Jimmy's jobs backstage is that it's a digital gift so you can buy it and you can have something to wake up on christmas morning and uh hand over and the very nice thing is as well if you pay for a year subscription we'll stick your name in our new studio somewhere somehow so you really will be part of the show um and i think if you work it out per month it's what it's barely a couple of beers or a cup of coffee exactly so um yeah definitely check that out yeah awesome yes studio that's that's a big thing for next year the upgrading of it yeah that's going to be a big thing to focus on i'm excited for what comes uh what comes next it's going to be it's going to be a big year you know with the studio obviously i'm a producer so i'm upgrading all the things that are on sort of my side of the wall yeah like all the pain points i have oh i want something to be able to monitor the cameras better or audio whatever we don't actually invest very much into your experience yeah so what yeah having a little look around the studio right now for our listeners we are looking around our studio i mean i think a big thing and we've got better we've got a lot better at this this year but is is the guest experience more than my experience of it right like it's my studio i'm pretty comfortable kind of in it i like the way that We've put more things on the shelves this year, like from guests and thank you notes that people have sent us and all that kind of stuff.

23:08But it's trying to make the guest experience as good as possible because you want people to be as relaxed as they can be so that they open up more, right? We've got an episode coming out with the investment minister next year, Jason Stockwood. just got fascinating kind of um backstory and yeah like we did almost get a bit dire of a ceo in it at one moment but that's because you know he was sort of relaxed and that's like you know looking after the team that come along with him you know getting people's drinks whatever if they're arriving at lunch asking whether they want food it's like all those little things i mean steve bartlett does talk about this a little bit you know sort of do sweat the small stuff do like the one percent things i and i think there's a lot of you know there's definitely been like an evolution of how you kind of go for these things also what was interesting with that episode is the level of you need a bit of knowledge and you need to have some research done but also you have to be reactive enough to be able to go where we ended up going much more into his kind of like family backstory than i'd kind of thought we would do at the start of it but it was it was super interesting so that's something you also learn as well and you can do that by being sort of you know just from having experience of having done it and having a bit of a relationship with people beforehand as well it's something that's quite important that makes a good interview right when you're doing these long formats like you need to have well it just makes for a much better show if you've kind of built something.

24:45I mean, we're going to be doing a couple of interesting people next year already that are lined up. And it's like building that relationship now before kind of sitting down with them kind of makes a real difference. Yeah. Okay, yeah, you've taken that in a very sort of deep and philosophical direction. I was expecting a more comfy chair or something. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But to your Stephen Bartlett point, I think that I saw a post the other day they're making sure that the studio is like 0.1 of a degree within a range because that's the most optimal human brain temperature and humidity so i think they've sweated so many small stuff they are really it's getting close to marginal gains at this point but fair enough they'll probably be proud of that fact you know one thing that i think would be cool do you ever watch sort of big boxing bout sort of heavyweight yeah and they sort of like you know hype themselves up and go down this big long corridor with sort of screens along the whole thing yeah unlimited budget it would be cool if we had one of those and they sort of come out into the studio having seen like all the sort of guests on the side ring walk yeah business ring yeah like a ring walk just to hike them up and they come in i think that'd be really cool well maybe for a live event next year there was something else i was gonna say i'd say one of the things that i've enjoyed as a highlight actually is getting a bit more upskilled on my ai artwork like we've done that for a few guests this year and i just love that i know you sit there and think like what is jimmy doing playing with kia starmer's face on a uh chat gpt for like two hours but i i really i kind of enjoy that and that just it's that but it's showing that kind of like level and commitment to guests makes a big difference i wonder if um kia starmer he said he's trying it for me as well i haven't gotten to do that yeah yeah we've got the spare one but um i wonder if he's changed his portrait in the sort of yellow stairway to the um to the ai one that would be funny wouldn't it he could do all of them when i was there actually last week um rishi sunak's picture wasn't up yet still it's like 18 months since he left have you seen that trump's just done the same thing with the walkway oh yeah And he's got, for the new sort of wing, the ballroom he's made, outside he's lined up all the pictures of all the previous presidents, except for written the sort of statement underneath them himself.

27:14So sort of underneath Biden, it says, worst president ever did this, did this. The Palmer, it says, most divisive, nasty guy, hate that country. Even the picture of Biden is just like an auto pen signature. Wow. One quick thing before we finish. We've been nominated for an award. Isn't that right? Yes, the Political Podcast of the Year Awards. So we've been nominated for Interview of the Year with Tainer Blair, which I'm particularly chuffed by because, well, that's my bit of the job, isn't it, really? I really enjoyed that. And we have also been put forward for the People's Choice Awards. So people can actually get involved with that one.

27:57So check out the show notes. It's number two on there. And it would be great fun to win that. I mean, we're up against some pretty stiff competition, but it's a pretty well-renowned podcast that you may have heard of. But it would be quite cool to win that. Yeah, it takes about one or two minutes, and it would really help us out. But, yeah, look, it's worth saying it feels nice to be honoured among such big names, such old-school industry players, and I think that's a real testament to the audience, how much love you've shown us, which allows us to book bigger and bigger guests. Definitely, definitely.

28:31We wouldn't have a show without them. That's true. Well, here's to 2026. Yes, here's to 2026. I hope you're having a very lovely Christmas break and let us know if you want us to do this again. Hopefully, I've taken your feedback on board.

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29:48Just perfect. Nice!