Summer Special #3

0:02Ben Hanlin: Welcome back to What's the Trick. I am your host Ben Hanlin and this is the podcast where I sit down with the world's most creative people and try and understand their creative process. And it's a bit of a different flavour this week. This is episode three of the summer specials because I'm on holiday at the moment. I'm currently in Portugal. I've ran into our bedroom and I've just grabbed a quick microphone and I'm recording this. so i hope you're having a lovely summer but this is how this episode works normally i would sit down with a guest not doing that i am instead i've dived i've dived into the vaults for you guys that's what i've done and i've found three fantastic guests that i'm going to introduce you to now these might be three people that you've already listened to their episode and you may have forgotten some of the gold that was in here so it's a great reminder and it's a great way of enjoying them again or if you're relatively new here and you've not heard these the first time around oh you're gonna love them and hopefully you'll go I'm gonna go and listen to them and go back and listen to the full episode so let's begin oh also as well I do have a culture vulture something I've read this week which I'm going to tell you about later in the episode but let's kick off going way back when to a conversation that I had with comedian Scott Bennett now Scott I think is a fantastic phenomenal comedian I think he should be a household name and should be selling out much bigger venues than he is he's brilliant and I've always I've been following his career for years I think he's family friendly and hilarious and very talented man but the reason his story is interesting is he had a brilliant job as a product designer and he quit all of that to be a comedian which is quite hard to do when you've got a young family and what I took from this episode was he said basically do not quit your job too early and he said it's a mistake he sees a lot of comedians or people make when they've got a hobby or a passion they quit their job before they're ready so scott was doing this on the side for about nine years literally day job night job working his ass off and he says that meant that when he quit he could control the opportunities that he could take because he had a lot of work coming in.

2:19Ben Hanlin: And he says, if you don't do that, if you quit your job too early, you end up then having to pay your bills and you take whatever job comes your way. And then you end up compromising on the type of work you want to do and the kind of act you want to be. And it weakens you in the long term. So I thought that was really interesting, which was instead of quitting your job too early, work really hard for longer so that you're in control when you do need to pay the bills. So that was Scott Bennett. And this is a little bit from that episode. enjoy but you've got wife mortgage kids yeah so your your starting point is so much harder right yeah and what what that does is it's because it's like i always say people say it's brave to do comedy it's brave to let someone you love do comedy like gemma effectively i introduced it i didn't do it when we were together when we first met so i introduced it like a mistress do you know what i mean and yeah and and the difficulty you get is i think someone said to me once you're either a comedian or you're not and that resonated with me because i feel like you can just carry on doing both but you know you hit a ceiling and what happens is you become average at your day job and you become average at comedy yeah and in some people you know you can be like well that's fine you know but for me if i'm doing it i want to be as good as i possibly can be and the only way when I gave up my job, the energy level to go into, I accelerated and achieved more in that first year of being full-time comedian than I did in eight years of doing both.

3:53Ben Hanlin: Yeah, because you, well, also you needed that to work, right? Well, that's the other thing is that what you've said there is you've gone to a roulette wheel and you've put everything on red. And, and there's that fear the fear of failure is what got me in my car and got me writing and got me you know i used to come in here where i like this i've got this shed of writing and i come in here and i'd write for like three or four hours every day and just start creating and and then it and and i feel like for me it took me a while though to process that that because i felt guilty because effectively I kept saying to Gemma, and I went and saw a woman and had CBT, and I remember it because I couldn't process the decision.

4:40I felt like I'd been really selfish. And she said to me, Scott, we're wasting our time here because all that's happening is you come in every week and you're asking me to tell you it's going to be fine. And I can't do that. And that's not how life works. And that's not how being self-employed works. And that's not how any of it works. She said and it was really interesting because ironically i think she was annoyed with me but we made more progress because she was honest because then she said if you're starting your own business i can't tell you it's going to work out if you're doing if you're if you're going to work for another company and you get offered another job i can't tell you that they're not going to make you redundant i can't tell you that their company's not going to go bust and then what was really interesting is i did two years as a full-time comic or three no two and a half years then covid happened and and what that actually did for me was go ah you see no one's safe no one's secure anymore and and so everything now from my point of view is everyone's fluid everyone's transient no one's got any anchors anymore in their in the employment world i always think that

5:46Ben Hanlin: i always think you know what okay we work for ourselves effectively you could you could have the most steady job in the world and you're one phone call away from being fired one meeting of like oh we've changed our minds see you later and then you're a risk as us right i'm risk averse that's the thing i'm not that sort of person so for me to do it i still can't believe i've done it if i'm being totally honest i still can't believe i did it and if it wasn't comedy i wouldn't have done it and there'd be some people that are listening to this that are probably on this cusp or think that what if like even like you say it might be something less risky like i could be a photographer or i could be this that is actually your viable work did you have a little checklist or a thing in your head of going right well what i did was is i uh my advice to people is you cannot do not quit your day job too early right i see it all the time i see people going i've got to get going with the dream this is holding me back and then what happens is they quit their day job and then they've got a financial pressure.

6:51So the dream has to pay instantly. And what that effectively does is dilute what you're trying to do because then you end up doing every gig going and it makes you hate it or it makes you worry about it and it kills your energy levels. And so what I did was I thought I'm going to work, I'm going to do both. And so if you ask Gemma, I was ashen. I was bags under my eyes. We had Olivia who was tiny at the time and I was going to Glasgow and then I was going getting up for work with two and a half hours sleep. I was in my 30s. I could do it then. I couldn't do it now. And I was sitting at my desk and my job was high pressured and I never told my boss where I'd been because I didn't want to bring those conversations in.

7:32So effectively, I was running on three or four hours sleep for eight years pretty much. But then once you do do it, have a bit of money behind you, save money. But then once you do do it, try and make the right decisions and my philosophy was and still is if it doesn't move me to where i want to be i don't do it go on so effectively i i try and do the things that are going to get me to where i want to like that are going to move me forward i'm going to at least you know it's very difficult because this problem with this job is opportunities don't look like opportunities because they come out of nowhere don't they you can do a really crap gig and then there's someone in the audience who sees you for something but i think it's that thing of trying to work and focus on getting in with the bigger clubs and getting in with all these before you quit your job so you've got that framework in place

8:31Ben Hanlin: so there you go that was the lovely scott benny there you can go back and listen to that full episode and our next guest in this one is music producer owen cutts if you don't know him you've probably seen him on Instagram on TikTok because he basically starts every single video the same which is new music's cool but have you ever heard of old music old music Fridays anyway Owen Cutts this was a great conversation because he's a music producer and he produced with Stormzy and I've never sat down with a music producer and gone well how does it actually work what is the process behind making all these hit records so this episode was one for you music buffs he is an encyclopedia of music he knows everything he lives he breathes music and it was just great to hang out with somebody that had this unbelievable passion for what they do so he lives and breathes music anyway what we learned in this episode he did a few things he taught us really how he kind of tricked stormzy into using his sample on a record and he goes into that and then also what i got to grips with when he was telling us about how you're a music producer basically these young artists get sent by their label to his house every day and they might not know him and they're going right hello i don't know you but you've got to make a record in four hours let's go his actual skill is being able to make strangers feel really comfortable really quickly and open up to him and because obviously you got to open up yourself open yourself you've got to be honest with each other with these complete strangers so you can then make this record so i thought that was really interesting on diving into how he could make these artists feel comfortable really quickly which is a skill we can all use so anyway like i say this is one for you music buffs here enjoy this one it's a little clip from owen cut well he he challenged me actually he was like i love the way you sample but i don't want to sound american i don't want to have an american sounding hip-hop record which is traditionally what it would sound like if you go down that route of sampling for hip-hop he was like i want it to feel british and i was like okay so i looked for lots of like british soul there is a rich history of british soul by the way that you can dig into but because it's like so identifiably uh it has such a style already so i was like hmm this is going to be tricky then i thought you know what i love soul music i can write soul music why don't i write a soul record and then just sample myself so then we don't have to clear it for anyone we don't have to clear any publishing just we already have it and if he doesn't like a lyric we can just change the lyric out we can swap it out so i said but i thought i wasn't gonna tell him about it i called my mate dan caplin who's an amazing songwriter singer very soulful plays the cello like beautiful keys player as well i said dan come to the studio and uh i just want to make write some soul records he was like you know say no more so he came over we wrote like five soul records on this like busted old world so which is like a yeah yeah like they had no legs i had it on a flight a flight case and when uh eventually went in the studio with stormzy he was like oh well you know like last time we spoke yeah we spoke about preparing these records for me he's like what have you got kind of thing yeah and i was like i hid them like all five of them i hid them in a playlist yeah of beats that i'd made from sampling so I thought I'm going to flick through them if he lands on one jobs it worked yeah if he doesn't fuck it didn't work I didn't want to be like I've had this grand idea where I write the soul and I play them to him and he's like you know he needs to think that he always needs to think that these are these are bangers already yeah yeah yeah or just like subliminally they're there yeah and I couldn't take the devastation of putting all this time working and playing him that's quite clever he was right well yeah i guess so i just i just kind of was like it's an easy win if it if it works yeah yeah and i'm clicking through and it lands on one of them and he went what's that yeah and i went did you go i know you know what i was just so like oh my god it worked oh my god like it didn't mean anything he just said what's that now i've worked with stormzy so much yeah look if he goes what's that then it's on the album yeah yeah he's he's got like a tuner in his brain that he once he hits he hits he is like a honing missile but he what's that play that again it's on the album you know it's done like you liked it and then he said can you loop it and i said yeah so i bought it so it was i brought it up on the yeah and we were doing it had a amazing there was a good Which song is this, by the way?

13:35This is a song called One Second. Yes, yes. It's on Heavy of the Head.

13:40Ben Hanlin: Ah, he's just so good. Honestly, if you've not listened to that episode, go and give it a listen. You'll just be smiling, I think, the whole time. I loved that conversation. A quick little plug from me before we dive into our final guest of this episode. My plug is this. You might wonder, Ben, what do you do other than the podcast? Well, I do a lot of corporate events and I do a lot of corporate speaking. And recently I've been spending a lot of my summer revamping my website, which I've just done, which is benhanlin.com. And on it, you can look at all my keynote speaking and some of the other things I do.

14:11Ben Hanlin: And there's loads of new videos up there. So if you haven't been on it a while, or maybe you've never been on it, go and give it a look. And if you know somebody that organizes events or book speakers or has that kind of stuff, then you can easily get in touch with me there. There we go. Plug over. I've got a culture vulture for you. something I've read this week whilst being on holiday and I thought it was fantastic it is Red Rising which was written by Pierce Brown so Red Rising is a bit of a sci-fi book it's a series of books and the idea is it's a very much like the Hunger Games meets Game of Thrones is how it's described there are people in class systems and they're made to work in their class system and the point is that one of the lower classes is gonna have an uprising and overthrow the higher classes it's a really good read it took me about it took me 100 pages to start getting into it and then i was hooked and i've got the second one i'm literally staring at it as i'm recording this called golden sun which i'm reading next but if you're after a book and you haven't read a bit of sci-fi for a while or you like that kind of genre uh then i think you'll like that it's called red rising let me know what you think and if you've read that and you're a fan dm me because i would like to know and speaking of dming uh as i say every episode uh if my goal i'm i'm self-producing this podcast i am loving it i've had some lovely messages even in the last week of people who've been listening and getting on board so if you are listening to this drop me a message and say hi tell me which episodes you've liked which one's your favorite if you'd like to see any potential guests let me know maybe you know some potential guests because that is always the hardest thing with keeping a podcast going is getting all the great guests which we're going to be doing over the coming weeks.

15:53Ben Hanlin: So any input from you guys, always appreciate you DM me on Instagram. And we've also got what's the trick pod on Instagram, give that a follow. And if you listen to any of these episodes from today, and you go back and listen to Scott or Owen, and you like it, and you think you've got a friend that might like it, if you could just share it in a WhatsApp group, or even share it on your Instagram stories or something like that, that's how we'll spread the word. And we'll just gather one listener at a time. And we'll build this lovely, lovely community. so that's enough from me this week um i'm going to move on to our final guest of this episode but our first guest ever and this is the fantastic simon squibb so simon squibb is an entrepreneur and he got mega famous on tiktok a few years ago because he was one of the few proper adults and proper entrepreneurs on tiktok before that was even a thing and he was the guy that would go up to people and say, watch your dream.

16:50Ben Hanlin: And he was going and watch your dream. And then he'd give them money to start their business. And he's built that. He's built his audience to millions and millions and millions of followers. So much so, I think he says he gets more views on his content than the BBC does. So he's got a team of people that work with him. But I wanted to know, how does this happen? How did you come up with this idea of what's your dream? how did you then execute it and then how did you build this audience of millions of people and even now as a businessman he's like running all these businesses and he's making all this content i wanted to get behind the curtain a little bit and understand how he does that from day to day um and one little fact actually a little tidbit i don't i think i may have talked about this i'm not sure before but we we ended up editing this episode as i do with all my episodes and we usually record for about an hour and 15 and then i probably cut them down to about 50 and he um two things interesting he was live on tiktok and instagram the whole time and i think that day he went live for nine hours because he was all about making content which is blows my mind um and he also said to me he said because my goal with this originally was to do 10 episodes and then stop and then see how i go and he went no i can't think like that you have to commit to a hundred episodes of this podcast.

18:08Ben Hanlin: And, uh, he said, if you do a hundred episodes, I will, uh, come back as your guest on the episode 100. But that was his chat. And since he said that to me, it really did spark a fire in my belly to go, actually, yeah, I have set this thing up. I have got this team going to stop after 10 is ridiculous. And I think something like only 1 % of podcasts last above 20 episodes, but that was very much his mindset is you don't stop You keep going because you never know when the thing's going to pop and you keep getting better. And then eventually all that work pays off. So I thought it was a really interesting episode, completely different.

18:46Ben Hanlin: You know, what have we had? We've had a comedian, a music producer and an entrepreneur all in the same show, which I think is really cool. So I'm going to stop yapping. That's it from me. Enjoy Simon Squibb. What was the process behind how we got Watch Your Dream? well i mean it's quite a interesting story it might be a bit long for the podcast today but i'll give you the sum up it's like i i always wanted to just help people without earning any money that was my original thing right i just wanted to give knowledge i didn't want to sell a course i didn't want to be one of those guys i just wanted to i have knowledge i want to give it to people and then um one day on tiktok they changed the system so that people could gift you so I was on TikTok I was giving someone some advice it was actually about two o 'clock in the morning and I'm I was just giving someone advice on TikTok and then someone dropped a big gift on TikTok I didn't really know what it was because it was new and then I closed the live and I basically made 150 something dollars and I thought oh okay I've been helping someone for free but then someone's dropped me a gift so i now earn money helping people which at the time fell against my mission right i was like oh i'm supposed to be helping people for free now it looks like i'm helping people to get money from gifts which wasn't my you know wasn't my mission uh so i um i thought i know i'm going to give that gift money away so i went to the bank and drew out the money and then i went and got some lunch at uh tesco's and then when i was at tesco's about to pick up sandwich there was a lady there filling the counter up and I just turned to her and I said hey um what's you know what's your dream what you know what would you love to do in life and it wasn't really very structured or very you know very well thought out and then she just gave me this amazing answer about an old people's home she'd like to build because her mum died alone at home and I just this person I probably would have ignored just I saw her eyes light up she told this whole incredible story and it just kind of inspired me i and i um i gave a actually i gave her 50 50 pounds of the 150 pounds i gave her 50 i would have made deposit to be your first customer in that old people's home in the future and she kind of looked at me like i was mad and looking around for like what is this and i just said i just really love your idea you have to do it i wouldn't want to die alone like you've just described you have to do this um and she's like oh okay thanks and i walked out and i kind of i didn't get the food uh i made a mistake because i got so excited about her idea and i walked out and i thought okay that's amazing and i suddenly had this almost like addiction to like wanting to know more people's dreams um so quickly that when it first came out of your mouth with that woman in tesco was it just instant it just flowed out or do you thought about it beforehand it would just just just came out i just i just like people so i think it's just like actually interestingly Interestingly, what happened next?

21:47Maybe go back to what's your dream. So what I then did is like, oh, that's really interesting. Asking someone what is their dream. But I'm a business guy. So maybe I thought to myself, maybe I should be asking, like, what business would you start? What would you do? You know, so I actually didn't get lunch in Tesco's. And I thought I saw Pizza Express across the road. So I walked into the Pizza Express. And this time I had my phone with me because I thought I didn't record that person's dream. What a shame. i didn't record it because maybe i could put it on my social and share it with people and they could help her so i thought okay this time i'm going to record these dreams these are amazing so i got my phone pov you know point of view put in front of me and i walked into pizza express and the guy that was standing behind the counter was like hi hi how you doing um table for one table for two i was like just a question for you what business would you start um so i actually changed the question the second time because i thought i'm a business person i should make it more businessy um and it was interesting because the guy basically gave an answer and it was quite interesting and then i gave him 250 pounds this time to pay for his website and pay for his branding stuff um and and this time i had it recorded and i put the video up and it went viral did really well um and then for quite a while the next three or four videos i think i was just asking people what business would you start and then some people were like i don't want to start a business i'm not interested and i thought oh as i started asking that question I realized that it was a bit closed-minded just the business because a lot of people don't realize they're in business like a lot of designers artists um you know magicians comedians whatever they all actually don't realize you're in business sometimes right and and I think you know I thought actually I'm being a bit I'm cutting off I'm feeding people's limiting beliefs by asking the question what business would you start because they will then give me an answer like I don't want to start a business I hate business and I'll be like so what I thought instead is I'd ask a or back to my original question which is what's your dream and then you allow people to also say something that could be ridiculous without sounding ridiculous yeah business you feel like you've got to say something really smart you've got to say i've got this linkedin idea but it's better it just helps people like that was my pitch for help bank right so it's like i think it's like people could just say something silly like i'd love to just fish all day i love fishing you know I'd love to be the best fisherman in the world.

24:04And you'd be like, all right. It doesn't sound like a business, does it? But actually, to make it happen, you need a business model. So it allowed me to apply my knowledge of business modelling to people's dreams, which made it genuinely more open. So I stuck with what's your dream. So there we go. That is another summer social over.

24:26Ben Hanlin: Let me know what you think about these. And if you've gone back and listened to these off the back of this, drop me a message this week and say what you think um love love hearing from you i'll be back next week with some more of these guests from the vault in our summer socials shout out to creative social for editing this video jack to jen for the do my socials to annika who organizes uh our scheduling and to my wife brianie who is a podcast producer as well so enjoy the rest of your week i'll see you all next week on what's the trick

25:01Thank you.