Politics, persuasion and podcasts - lessons from Jimmy's Jobs of the Future

0:28Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to Uncensored CMO. I have. How's it feel being the guest? It's nice. You can look out the window. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's sort of, it's good. It's kind of, I've really enjoyed sort of prepping for this because you learn so much when doing a podcast, but you don't sort of necessarily get an opportunity to kind of repeat it back. Yeah. I was at an award ceremony the other day, the Marketing Week Awards, and we won something which was very, very exciting. But I ended up being sat right at the front of, you know, literally right by the steps up to the stage. and we had this amazing comedian called Maisie Adams who was absolutely brilliant.

1:03She was so funny. And I had my back to the stage and I was thinking, please don't pick on me. You know how comedians kind of roast the front row? I was intentionally like, you know, head in my hands, looking the other way. Please don't pick me. Of course, where did she go? She literally picked me. And then she goes, what's your name? What do you do? And I said, John, podcast. And she goes, yeah, middle-aged white man. It figures. Yeah, going for an identity. Going for an identity crisis. There we go, there we go. He's always going to get called out. But anyway, here we are, two middle-aged white men with a podcast living up to the dream.

1:37But how did you end up in this situation? What happened was, so I was an advisor in Downing Street. Now that used to be a really impressive line on its own. Like now I have to qualify a bit more with, I wasn't involved in any parties and I was there for a lot younger than 50 days. But essentially I left at the end of 2019 and I was like, I need some time and some space to figure out what I was going to do next. We'd just had our first kid. And I went out to study at Stanford originally for a couple of months on their kind of like executive entrepreneurship program. And we had a great time out there, took the wife and the newborn with us.

2:11But this was March 2020. And, of course, the world sort of changed and everyone remembers their March 2020. And we got back on the last flight to the UK. My wife is a doctor, so she was like, I want to go back to work and help with the fight. and so she was back at work sort of in April and I became a stay-at-home dad to our five-month-old and those listeners that have got young kids or had young kids well no there isn't much you can do with a five-month-old they're too young to even really watch telly so basically we just listen to lots of audio and with our one-hour walk around the park as well and so during that time I thought is there something I can do here to help tackle the unemployment crisis that's going to be coming up and I thought back to a conversation I used to have quite regularly with the PM at number 10 would be I would take the call from Debenhams or Wilkinsons at 5 to 8 in the morning saying, we're just about to go into administration and we're going to make 10 ,000 people redundant.

3:00And I would walk into the 8 a.m. meeting with the PM and sort of say this wonderful news. And she would say sometimes, Jimmy, all you ever tell me about is job losses. Like, yeah, at this time, the stats showed record high employment. She was like, where are all these new jobs coming from? And I was like, well, you know, it's entrepreneurs that create one or two jobs a week, but that never gets wrapped up into a jobs announcement. And so from then on, I thought, well, I'm going to include in my weekly note for her a company that is sort of making, you know, is hiring and doing interesting things.

3:29And so that was the concept for the podcast, essentially, was could we recreate those kind of conversations I used to have in number 10 about where the future of the economy was going, but sort of democratize it to a wider audience and inspire people? Because at the crux of it, I think there's this interesting thing that's happening in the world, which is it's never been a better time to be building, starting or switching a career. There's more opportunity than there's ever been. but it is a lot less linear than it has been in the past. Like there's a lot less shop floor to boardrooms kind of stories.

3:59And so actually, if you don't come from a sort of privileged background, it can actually be harder to work out what to do than it's ever been. So you've got a sort of paradox happening of where, yeah, it's never been better, and then it's also never been harder as well. And so that's the idea of the show is that we talk to really interesting people about what jobs they're doing, what their advice would be. And yeah, we're 250 episodes in now. And you've had some like insane guests as well. Just your back had like Tony Blair. You even had the current prime minister. I mean, that must have been a scoop to get him to take a, you know, take a bit of time off to come and chat.

4:33Yeah, well, that was an interesting one. So I can tell you about a couple of those things. I mean, I have to say interviewing Tony Blair at the start of last year was quite a moment because there's something very strange about interviewing politicians from your youth. Like you just have them on a completely different sort of pedestal, really. So that was interesting. But then he's always been a very good communicator. And I think he saw what was happening with the kind of the Trump effect and so on, and was had always been quite sort of keen to do it. So difficult to put him down, but we did in the end.

5:06The Prime Minister one was interesting because one of the things I've learned interviewing serving politicians, particularly those in government, is quite hard because they are, as I know better than anyone, like really busy. And so they don't perhaps have as much time to kind of think about some of the kind of broader issues and so on. But Downing Street were very keen to kind of do it. And they were the ones that sort of suggested it. and it sort of, we had this whole game of where initially they were like, can you come to the Midlands and do six minutes with him? I was like, it's not really a podcast then in that case.

5:37And basically sort of this dance continued for a couple of weeks until they were like, well, look, come to number 10 and you can have 15 minutes, which I know is quite a long time for a PM to give and I knew that once we were in the room we'd be able to push it to 20 as well. So it sort of worked quite well. And I think he came across quite well. And look, I'm a former Conservative Special Advisor, right? So I'm not sort of exactly a natural bedfellow of the Labour Party. But what I would say in my research about Keir Starmer was that it was quite interesting listening to what kind of working class background he'd come from.

6:08And I thought this is a guy who has got to the top of both law and politics in his career. That is quite impressive given where he's come from. So that's what we're always trying to start the show with, particularly when we're interviewing people from public service. It's like, even if we, even if I don't agree with them and so on, is that we want to give them a fair hearing and we're interested in what kind of persuaded them to go into it. And this is what I think people are coming around to realise the power of podcasting. I know we talked about, or people talk about the last election in the US being the podcast election, but it's incredible the power of, you know, Trump going on Joe Rogan, for example, because it shifted the conversation from, at best, you might get four minutes on CNN.

6:46That would be like a steal the show kind of slot. So suddenly you've got three hours with Joe Rogan. You come across entirely differently when you've got nowhere to hide and you tend to get more personal, you go deeper. It's a very different media that gives a – I mean, listening to your interview with Keir, I say Keir, you know, I say Keir, Prime Minister. Casually dropping my mate Keir. But in terms of my perception of him before I listened to that, it was completely different, you know, Because he's coming for a lot of stick. There's a lot of things he's done I disagree with. It's been very hard, right?

7:22Yeah. But he came across very down to earth, very human, very warm. You see a completely different side of somebody, don't you, when you have a... You do. And it's also the way that it sort of starts as well. Because with that, we're obviously sort of doing the testing of the mics and so on. So you're having a bit of that kind of sort of filler chat and so on. And we were in the small dining room in Downing Street, which was like my favourite room, because it's basically where Thatcher and Gorbachev sort of thawed the Cold War. And it was great for when I was getting invested into Number 10 to have that room specifically because you could sort of start with that and you would immediately sort of loosen them up because a lot of investors tended to be Americans in their 50s and 60s.

7:58So they were of that generation where that happened in their formative years. So that was quite a good sort of trick that I learned early on. And so we were sort of chatting a bit about that and he was asking me about being here. And then I was telling him the story of how the podcast had started. And I realised I was sort of getting a bit too sort of deep into it ill and thinking gosh we're sort of eating into time but then he interestingly picked up on the stay-at-home dad stuff and he was asked me about whether he thought it made me a better father and stuff and it turned out that he had done that between sort of finishing as a lawyer and starting the job at the public prosecutions and it was it was just really interesting and we sort of basically started the podcast from there and in some ways I kind of wish we'd just gone and like spent 20 minutes on that um i'm not sure the press team would have been that happy about it but i thought again he was coming across quite well there and quite interesting in a way that he couldn't go anywhere else and sort of talk about that yeah i mean i think you should do diary of a ceo honestly i think that i think that would if he did one thing to transform perception of him and the party right now would be that i mean kamala harris came on a diary recently and that was really interesting i mean obviously it's different for her because she's no longer you know in in a race and in frontline politics, but it's just so powerful.

9:11You just see a completely different side of people. It is, but I think the problem is, I mean, I remember when Sadiq Khan did Diary of a CEO and it'd be interesting to get Stephen's reflections on it, but he wouldn't answer the question about, like, what's your biggest weakness, what's your biggest kind of regret. And I get that, and, you know, he responds by saying, you know, it's just going to be used by my political opponents against me, and so on. And I just, it's interesting how you, it comes back to that when you're serving this stuff is is harder to do and i just wonder how much steven wants to do it i mean i i thought what was quite interesting was steven's interview with boris johnson as well actually sort of from last year because it steven unlocked a bit of boris that i hadn't sort of really seen before where he was like associating with him on the sort of being from a kind of broken home etc and was asking boris about when was the moment your parents told you you were being divorced.

10:03You know, I've known Boris for 20 years. I've never heard him talk about that. Like, he's always been quite sort of private about that. And actually, he sort of got that. And it was just a very interesting kind of way of doing it. I think that's what he's very good at, isn't it? It's like tapping into the personal story, the emotion. He did that with Kamala. I know he brought some photos of, you know, special moments of Korea, and it really changed the dynamic in the conversation. I mean, you've obviously worked as an advisor. I remember doing media training with the BBC, in fact. and it was one of the best days of my life.

10:32It was really exciting because I remember walking into a room and they give you no preparation. You go straight into the studio and then they hit you with some really hard questions. I was, at the time, I was marketing director on LucasAid and we're going through the sugar tax and we're having to announce that we're kind of halving the amount of sugar in the formulation and so on. And the brand's been around for 80 years. I remember sitting in the studio, first question is, when will you apologise? I'm like, what am I apologising for? When will you apologise? because you're admitting today that you've had twice the amount of sugar in leukos aid and generations have grown up you know with too much sugar in their diet and they're obese because of you when will you apologize you know really hard yeah really hard but what's amazing is that afterwards then i had a panel of people sat behind the screen kind of assessing my performance then you basically get deconstructed in terms of the job you did and it was it was it was exciting and nerve-wracking at the same time but i learned so much but the um the thing of course i think you know is relevant to this conversation is that you learn to pivot all the time back to the message but it's like this game that we all know politicians are doing so every time you and it gets exhausting doesn't it it's like please answer the question so why is it that politicians can't just be honest i mean i mean because you must have advised plenty in your in your career well i think there's a lot of you know journalists are so embedded in the kind of westminster system that they know the weak points and so on that they're trying to get to and they're all driven by creating news and headlines and it all becomes a bit of a kind of circular kind of motion in terms of that's all they want etc and that's why i think part of the problem of our politics at the moment is it's just so short term in terms of who's up who's down um and so on and it's you know it's i just think it's really hard because they kind of zone in on that and also is they do often only have sort of you know max like you know even like the big sit downs with like laura coonsberg on a sunday are still like 12 to 14 minutes right like it's really difficult to actually sort of like explain nuance i think that's one of the things in our system is it's just got you know the government has got so big and so complicated that it is just difficult to explain all these kind of like trade-offs and decisions that have to be taken because that's ultimately what politics is the entire time is like a series of of trade-offs yeah now you've had some insanely successful and well-known people on your podcast what would be the top let's say what are the top three episodes that you you've done and would would that surprise people yeah so i think well so so let's take last year right so i i'm going to give you five guests i want you to kind of guess the order of where they came in terms of oh i like this right so we had tony blair Jules Guides Tim Campbell Rory Sutherland and Simon Scribb what are the order of those five that break down in terms of long form views right you'd probably assume it's Tony Blair why don't we include Keir Starmer that here oh yeah let's do that Keir Starmer okay you would think Keir Starmer because he's in the news he's current prime minister however you can hear from Keir Starmer every single day he's in he's in the press all the time so I'm just wondering whether as unique as it was to get him to talk off the record people are probably a bit checked out Tony Blair I would have assumed is up there but I'm guessing because the way you've asked the question maybe not and also it's been quite a long time since he's been relevant as fascinating as it is so i think it's more about current uh and knowing how the algorithms work as well i think it's about how current you are in social media with algorithms and so on so i'm gonna go simon squib top then rory sutherland what was the second one Jules Jules Guides

14:40I'm going to go Jules next then I'm going to go hang on you've got Simon Scribd number one Rory number two Jules number three I'm then going to go Tony Blair Keir Starmer and Tim Campbell I'm going to go in that order because I think the politicians are going to be at the bottom half and then we're going to go based on recency, Sakia obviously being current, Tony Blair and Tim Campbell. So that is pretty good, but not... You called Simon Squibb massively wrong. Okay. So that's interesting because, so basically, the order that it goes is... From the bottom of it, it's Keir Starmer and Tony Blair are about the same, basically.

15:24And bear in mind, Starmer added six months less as well, so you've got to kind of factor in. But those two are sort of at... Well, at the bottom is Simon Squibb, actually. And then next is Keir Starman and Tony Blair basically agreed. But then it is Tim Campbell, then Rory Sutherland, and then Jules Gides. He's got more than anyone. So you've got about half right? You've got about half right. About half right, okay. Simon's got a very big following, hasn't he? He has, but I think the thing is, is that he makes a lot of videos about his advice. So my logic on why Jules and Tim do well is that they don't do many videos on their background, whereas Simon has done a lot, and it's quite powerful anyway, in terms of the algorithm.

16:10But it's interesting, because I thought Simon's clips did amazingly well, interestingly. Blair and Starmer both did well, but not sort of stratospheric. Not sort of like change the world well. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So it's just quite an interesting sort of thing, really. But I think it comes to the point of it can be quite difficult to predict what is going to do well. I mean, if you told me Jules Geiser was going to come on top of that, I mean, I was sort of almost a bit reluctant about doing the interview, really. I'm totally sure. It's like our biggest one. So, but to be fair, it's quite interesting.

16:44He basically goes around London making tour guide videos. And he does have a really interesting job because he's basically tour guide, meets YouTuber, meets comedian, meets historian. and like it's just quite an interesting sort of mixture of things. Yeah. And what about you? What are your top five? Oh, well, probably soon to you actually. There's a few surprises and probably a few, you know, expected ones in there. So if I throw out five at you, so I recently had Gary Vee, who's pretty well known, and he's probably got the biggest social media following of anybody that I've ever interviewed. I start the year, interesting, every year for the last three years, So I started the year with Les Bonet and Sarah Carter, and they wrote this iconic book called How Not to Plan.

17:29And so every year I do a How Not to Plan in 2026 or 2025. So within advertising, they're kind of legendary. Mark Ritson. Mark Ritson is the founder of Mini MBA. So he trains a lot of marketers. He writes for Ad Age. He used to write for Marketing Week. A bit of a scoop this year, actually. Do you remember the Jaguar rebrand last year that got a lot of controversy? I actually managed to interview the managing director for Jaguar, a guy called Rorden Glover. So he's been on the show. And then something else I experimented this year with as well was actually having two people on to tackle a topic, including actually Jaguar was one of the topics.

18:06And I had Rory Sutherland and Scott Galloway. And both of them have obviously got a big following between them. But I changed the format. So I did an episode with Rory, did an episode with Scott, and then I got them together to discuss a topic. And I put that out. So that's five big ones from the year. So, gosh, what's up now? I'm going to say, I basically get in and get in by my own thing. So I'm going to guess, so I just read them all out. I reckon fifth was Mark Ritson. Fourth, Gary Vee. Yeah. Three, Les Burnett and Sarah Carter. Yeah. Two, The Jaguar Story. Yeah. and one Rory Sutherland and Scott Galloway because that's just a powerhouse yeah you are very close very very close you're not far off so surprisingly to most people listening Gary Vee last I say last I mean fifth I mean obviously he's way up there compared to anyone else but actually relative to his social following and I think I was really delighted with that episode because we filmed it at his dad's wine shop where he came from so we got quite unique content it's where he grew up you know it's a different conversation but I think for my audience Gary V's kind of on the edge of the audience a bit and he's you know obviously you can hear from him any time four for Les and Sarah actually so Les and Sarah for my audience are absolute stalwarts and you know I've always got a really good you know got a good thing to say Ritson number three okay actually Ritson's Ritson is a he's so opinionated he's always got data he's very good very entertaining number two so you got this one right Rorden Glover yeah the Jaguar.

19:47Now that's partly because, although I don't tend to interview managing directors as much, that story was probably the biggest story in marketing in the last 12 months. And everyone's got an opinion about it. So to actually talk to the guy behind it was a massive scoop. But number one, and he called it Rory Sutherland and Scott Galloway. And the interesting thing about it was I interviewed them individually and put those episodes out and together. And there's something about the contrast between the American kind of economics and, I mean, Scott Galloway's got a book, The Algebra of Wealth. And Scott is algebra.

20:21He's data, he's logic. And Rory is just this eccentric kind of, you know, creative, you know, behavioural scientist who just looks at the world as magic. And I think the combination of that, and being very British as well. Yeah, yeah. Ultra British. Yeah, ultimately, quintessentially British. the the mix of those two thinking styles is just magic to watch yeah so if i can ever do that again i i'm gonna try and find ways of doing that because that's that's really cool i do think i do think if there's a way you can put like other inputs into people like one of the ones this was an old one that we've done now but it's like three and a half years ago was with ben francis of gymshark but interestingly it's one of the few interviews that ben has done alongside Noel Mack, the chief brand officer there.

21:08And I do think that sort of slightly unlocked Ben in different ways because he was there. So I do think, particularly with these people that are used to giving interviews, if you can find another way, partly changing the environment as well, like Gary Vee and the wine shop, but I think it is an interesting sort of like movement. So if you had to pick the episode that has inspired you the most, so not necessarily the one that's done the best, but has inspired you. I often talk about my 100th episode with Myles Jacobson, the Chief Executive of Football Manager, because for me that was just, I think when I started it all, it was like that was one of the guests that I really wanted to do because I partly just wanted to go to Football Manager offices.

21:48But also when I think about the people that we're trying to inspire on the show, which is generally the sort of like the 22 to 32-year-olds that are in a job but maybe not sure if they're in the right one. Like most people just get a job. and we're sort of we're for the kind of like driven and ambitious but maybe slightly directionless people is who i'd sort of think about basically what i was in my 20s and i just thought that episode was so interesting on so many levels he also doesn't do many interviews as well so we were kind of lucky to get him and it was just interesting some of the stuff he was saying he was like yeah we're not short of computer programmers because we're football manager actually we're short of people that can write english narrative and so on so i think it was just that sort of element is so it's the one that i cite one we did with octopus legacy guy called sam grice so octopus legacy is largely a world writing company although it's kind of like expanding now and it was just interesting because he started the company after his mum had died and i remember thinking this gosh it's gonna be a really hard interview and actually it just completely changed my sort of opinion and it was put me at ease and so on so that's one that sort of just was was different and so on but it's it you'll find this way i I mean, you probably get asked your kind of like favorite episode.

23:00And I do try and have a bit of a roster that in terms of meeting people at a party or something. And I will say, well, go and check this episode out. Because I think if you recommend a whole podcast to someone, it can be a bit overwhelming now when they've been going for sort of like five to seven years of like, oh gosh, where do I even sort of start with this? I'm like that with the rest is history, right? I know I would love the rest is history, but I just don't know where to start with it. And so I always try and think of what the person is like and what's one episode they might like. What about you?

23:29Who do you direct? Well, my answer usually is, in fact, this is through our mutual friend, Rory. In fact, it was during this interview, actually with Rory and Scott, that he mentioned this idea of reverse benchmarking. And he mentioned this guy, Will Godara, who basically is the founder of 11 Madison Park in New York, which got to number one in terms of the Michelin top 50 restaurants in the world. and one of the things Rory was talking about is he said they used to go and scout out rival restaurants but rather than focus on what they did well they focused on what they did badly and he tells the story of like they went to this rival restaurant the perfect dinner it was absolutely you know spotless brilliant and at the end of the meal they were sat there going we cannot beat these guys there's nothing they've done we could improve on and then they got served the coffee and they drank the coffee and was like do you know what this coffee's just coffee it's just average coffee and it was right at the end they thought hang on a second what rather than having like a wine sommelier who you know introduce you to a thousand you know esoteric wines um what if you had a beer sommelier and a coffee sommelier and a tea sommelier so you basically found every single bit of the uh of the experience you found out how can we do that to world-class standard and i listened to rory talk about it he sort of rebranded it reverse benchmarking which i thought was quite clever and And anyway, Rory introduced me to Will.

24:51And we went over to Nashville and recorded basically an interview with him talking about how he got to become the world's number one restaurant. Now, my audience is marketers, right? That's who I'm targeting. And you might go, well, what's a restauranteur got to teach marketers? And I've never had an interview that's got so much marketing wisdom from somebody who you wouldn't consider to be a marketer in terms of how they tell the story, in terms of like, you know, who they target and how they target them and the importance of the experience over, you know, over the products and all that kind of thing.

25:23Because basically the idea effectively of the book is they first made the top 50 list about seven years before they won it. And they were in the big award ceremony and they do it from 50 to one, right? And they were sat there going, oh, I wonder where we've come. We're sat next to Heston Blumenthal. You know, does this mean we're kind of in the same league? you know at number 50 11 madison park and they said it was like literally losing we were the losers in the room and and they went off and you know kind of left early went to drink a lot and consoled themselves and what they decided actually at that point is they could not win on the food so the only way they're going to win is on the service and the service was the thing that restauranteurs overlooked or it's not they overlooked it but it was very stereotypical it's very stiff it was very formal and actually his belief was how you feel basically dictates what you'll think about the experience afterwards if we can make people feel like they've had a personal experience it's been completely what they need every need has been cared for and way beyond the food in terms of when you walk in and how you get served and how long you stay and how the bills presented everything was just thought about in terms of the service not necessarily the food and thinking about from marketing perspective we often obsess about products or we obsess about how we communicate things but actually if you obsess about the experience that somebody gets when they're when they're your customer and all that that involves you suddenly open up the aperture of of what your brand stands for a lot more anyway so i found it just fascinating and inspiring but sometimes you have to step out of your own kind of you know discipline don't you to actually kind of get the inspiration and how much do you think going to nashville heightened that as a kind of experience on a podcast for you in terms of the sort of the travel time and the amount of time you must have spent thinking about it as well definitely helped actually i mean i i read his book twice so i read it once as a as a punter and then i kind of read it a second time as an interviewer so i i thought very carefully about it i mean going to someone's i mean it wasn't in his home he was in a podcast studio like this in nashville but but going to where someone is has a different feel to it doesn't it yes because you're kind of in there, you know, on their home turf.

27:38The other thing that helped very generously, we had a couple of hours. So we had a bit more time than normal, which is amazing because I could relax into it and we could, you know, in fact we ran over a little bit. So it was having the extra time and space was good. Yes. And also, to be honest, somebody that's not in marketing, you don't get the typical marketing response. So one of the challenges I have is obviously I ask a lot of similar questions to a lot of different people and you can get the same answer. And you tend to get sometimes a slightly more obvious answer. Whereas talking to someone like Will Godara, somebody who doesn't think like a marketer, although he's one of the best marketers on the planet, I think, just means you just get a much more interesting question.

28:19The other thing, of course, is he is an absolute pro at telling a story. Now, you know, obviously, if you've got the world's number of restaurant, you will have told that story a few times. I mean, you must find this as well, right? You have a guest who knows how to use the medium. Yeah. Now, often I find with CMOs, they're used to being in corporate presentations. They're used to being in team meetings, right? And therefore, they'll ramble or they'll take a while to get to the point. Whereas someone like Will Godara will just say precisely what needs to be said and then have a beautiful story about when he was sat down with Oprah Winfrey talking about, you know what I mean?

28:55He'll just have a beautiful way of telling a story and getting to a point, which makes for good content. I found that CEOs and entrepreneurs quite similar. can be a bit business, a bit corporate speak and so on, but actually broadcasters and politicians basically spend their lives doing interviews, right? We say, yeah, well, how terrible they come across and whatever, but they are really sort of forged in it, like in terms of it is a primary kind of component of their job. So they're often sort of quite good to interview, I think. They don't sort of tend to waffle so much, which might surprise kind of people, really.

29:29But I think when you put them in, again, when you put them in a kind of relaxed environment and so on. Which politician would you most like to kind of get on? Partly because of recency, I love Kemi Baden-Koch's response to the budget, right? This is just, we were recording this just after the budget. Oh my God, that was, she was on fire, wasn't she? Yeah. And I just wonder, like, she's very impressive to listen to. She's very good at going on the attack and having information at her disposal. But I just wonder what it's like to take over a party that's in utter free fall. Everyone hates you because of the legacy that's just been left.

30:05And you're probably third or fourth in the polls. I mean, I just think the interesting position that she's in, I don't know, I find her quite fascinating. Yeah, I think she'd be good. Are you going to get her off? Breaking news, ladies and gentlemen. You heard it here first. That phone call was just going with the Chancellor's press office. So that's what I just also think about. We interrupt this podcast to bring breaking news the Chancellor Rachel Reeves put a ticker up guys put a ticker up to the producers I'd say one of the worries that I've got for kind of like podcasting in 2026 and beyond a little bit is the amount of shows that are interview shows that are being released means that everyone might end up staying in their lanes quite a lot and so what I mean by that is if you look recently you've had Amal Rajan launch his podcast you've had Emma Barnett launch hers you've had Michelle Hussain launch the Bloomberg show So Romesh Ranganathan has launched his show as well.

31:02Now, my sort of thinking on it is that it might end up being a lot of the same people going on the particular kind of verticals of those podcasts that those people kind of relate to. And that slightly worries me a bit because I think, so for example, Michelle Stane's second interview was with Nigel Farage. And it was a fascinating interview and it was really interesting on both sides. Totally think both sides got a lot out of it. but I thought to myself I wonder how much Nigel Farage would get out of actually doing Romesh Wang and Nathan's show instead Romesh might be the opinion he's not quite ready to sort of do that yet he needs to kind of like ease himself in but I just thought it was I just thought it was interesting with the proliferation of podcasts that come out is that actually sort of hopping across the genres is going to be of more sort of benefit for people potentially and that's why I think I'll spoil I think the magic here would be comedians and politicians because you had Jeff Norcott on didn't you yeah yeah yeah I love Jeff Norcott because he's a very funny average bloke.

32:00I mean, his entire persona is the kind of, you know, the bloke down the pub. But his observational humour is just absolutely spot on. But I think, like, politicians would benefit from being interviewed by a comedian and almost, like, having a bit of a piss take out of it. I think that would work really, really well. I mean, can you imagine Jimmy Carr interviewing Nigel Farage or something like that? Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. The entertainment value. But I think any politician that was willing to lean into it and almost like have themselves roasted. I think they'll get a lot. It's quite interesting.

32:30I mean, Matt Ford's very good at that. Like the Labour guy and the Nottingham Forest fan is very good at it. So yeah, it's interesting. He was basically the first podcast I ever listened to. The first podcast I ever listened to was George Osborne on Matt Ford's podcast. And it was just, it was very funny. And I think also that's something that in politics we've sort of underestimated a lot actually. It's like politics without human personality is just words on a page, right? It's just a manifesto, effectively. That's pretty boring. It is politicians that bring it to life, and bringing stuff to life is like marketing, humour, all these different things.

33:04So I think we sort of underestimate that, and I think it is definitely part of the kind of like Trump-Farage-Boris appeal is sort of, they do take themselves to it, but there's a sort of light-hearted nature to it. Well, it's Farage down the pub with a pie, or it's Boris doing the zip wire at London 2012, isn't it? It's those things that suddenly make them relatable, that counts. I was going to ask you a question actually on this because I don't know if you know this about marketers or advertisers, but there's been this poll of who do you trust by profession? So you've got doctors and solicitors and so on at the top.