Interview with Erik Kruger from the podcast “The Expansive”

Episode 50 Interview with Erik Kruger from the podcast “The Expansive”.txt
English (US)

01:00:00.000 — 01:00:03.720 · Speaker 1
We believe that not everybody should have a podcast.

01:00:04.040 — 01:00:08.480 · Speaker 2
Is that you get to distribute into the networks of the guests that you have on the show.

01:00:08.520 — 01:00:12.960 · Speaker 1
Brand building point of view. I think it’s an amazing opportunity.

01:00:13.080 — 01:00:19.440 · Speaker 2
Chemistry, because that’s what the pot is about. You know, everyone always comments on the chemistry before they comment on the content.

01:00:22.000 — 01:00:32.080 · Speaker 1
Welcome back to the podcast cave. And with me today is Eric Kruger. Eric, I want you to introduce yourself. Explain to our audience who you are and what you do.

01:00:33.680 — 01:01:15.790 · Speaker 2
In a nutshell, I’m a keynote speaker and author. I spend most of my time helping organizations, leaders, teams to move through change, and a lot of that has actually become me being a content creator. So these days I do videos, podcasts. Our podcast has been going since 20, either late 2018 or early 2019 ish.

So we’ve been going in that space for a long time. I write a newsletter called Modern Leader. Do lots of short form video so it feels like my life is mostly about consecration, and it’s all in service of helping leaders kind of rethink how they show up and lead in 2026 and beyond.

01:01:15.830 — 01:01:20.310 · Speaker 1
Okay, great. And you do a lot of transformational leadership, if I understand correctly. Right.

01:01:20.590 — 01:02:28.660 · Speaker 2
Transformational leadership has kind of become the overarching theme for what I talk about because in in my perspective, transformational times require transformational leaders. And so the moment you can package it and give it a name, it just becomes a bit more tangible for people to latch on to. I see, and over the years, we’ve had this proliferation of different leadership models and leadership theories like servant leadership and authenticity leadership and ethical like it’s just the list is never ending, but none of them.

And I think that like the naming convention matters because it speaks to you in the right moments and the right time and helps you to make a connection that translates into movements and behavior. But I just feel like if you think about it from a even from a branding perspective, I feel like transformation is the word of the moment.

That’s what we are all experiencing in the world around us, and it’s definitely something that we need to be producing in our personal lives and professional lives. So I’m also using it from a branding perspective. I think it’s important for us, you know, but I think it’s also it’s kind of a bit of a branding play as well.

01:02:28.700 — 01:02:37.420 · Speaker 1
Tell me, where does the podcast come from? I mean, you’ve been doing it for a while. Where did it start? How did it spark?

01:02:37.460 — 01:02:38.100 · Speaker 2
Yeah,

01:02:39.660 — 01:03:39.769 · Speaker 2
sure. So, uh, it’s actually my second podcast. My first podcast was called Better Man. It was my own podcast that I started in 2015. And I remember, like back then, podcasting was very complicated to set up, but we we ran our own little podcast And then kind of closed the down when I shut down Better Man and was thinking about starting a new one.

And at the same time, I met a guy called John Zorn. John is a fellow author. He’s in the futurist space. We got along really well from the from the get go. And then at some point I just thought, well, maybe it’ll be cool for me and him to actually have the conversations that we have offline, online. It was just like, it’s almost like one of those very typical sort of transitions into podcasting.

And we’re like, well, we have all these awesome conversations about the future and about leadership. And maybe if we just put it online and can serve as content and also help other people. And so

01:03:40.970 — 01:04:21.840 · Speaker 2
I remember being quite nervous about messaging him and saying to him, like, let’s do it. Because I thought, what if I get shot down? Yeah. But he came back within like 30s. He was like, yes, like straight away. Let’s just do it. And so we started in 2019, I think I floated the word expansive. It felt like the right kind of language.

And then he was like, no way. That was actually my word of the year the previous year. So it was coincidental like that. And we just thought it. And now we are 280 ish episodes later. We’ve had two awards from the Africa Podcast and Voice Awards. Uh, yeah. It’s been it’s been a cool ride. It’s been a cool journey.

01:04:21.880 — 01:04:42.520 · Speaker 1
And talk to me about the style, because I took a look at it and it’s incredibly conversational. You know, there’s it feels like like you were saying, the conversations you have offline, it feels like we’re, like, kind of eavesdropping into that. Um, how how intentional are you about that? Or is it just something that flows?

01:04:42.800 — 01:04:48.959 · Speaker 2
Yeah, that was very intentional from the start. We wanted it to feel like you were just hanging out with us

01:04:49.960 — 01:06:39.350 · Speaker 2
most. I mean, most podcasts have a very similar format. It’s mostly interview style, um, conversations. And it’s great for extracting knowledge. I don’t think it’s always great for building relationships. Okay. You have to spend a lot of time listening because usually the host talks a lot less. So you have to spend a lot more time listening to them to build that connection.

Whereas and they also typically get into the meat of the content or the like into the knowledge as quickly as possible. So we thought, well, we actually want to we want you to find value in the relationship that you have with us and in feeling like you are just part of us having a chat as friends in the room. And I think we’ve been very successful in doing that.

And, you know, every, every format has its upside on its downside. And so the format for us from an upside perspective has been we have parasocial relationships with people like you can’t imagine. You know, they come and and speak to us at events. And people have listened to hours and hours and hours of the podcast, and they know.

They know the inside jokes that we crack. They like sometimes, you know, we rag each other on the pod all the time because we’re friends. And then people will come and rag me about what I’ve been ragged on, on the pod. So it’s like. It’s so funny. It’s like they almost feel like they’re already part of the inner circle.

So you build that relationship very, very quickly. The downside for us, which is the upside for the the hosted format is distribution. So because it’s just the two of us, the distribution that we mostly have is just into our own networks. Whereas I think the distribution with a hosted podcast is that you get to distribute into the networks of the guests that you have on the show.

So growth for us has been

01:06:40.710 — 01:06:50.070 · Speaker 2
more challenging, I think, than for like an interview style pod. But from a relationship perspective, I think it’s been amazing.

01:06:50.110 — 01:07:05.700 · Speaker 1
Okay. It’s a really interesting insight though, is how you distribute has got a lot to do with your guests, of course, and how they spread it. For sure. Um, do you do any formal distribution other than just putting it out there? Do you do you promote it? Do you boost it?

01:07:06.780 — 01:07:47.860 · Speaker 2
Yeah. I mean, you know, in the seven years of running the part, we’ve tried every imaginable thing, uh, really to to grow the pod that’s ranged from. I mean, just recently we were still putting out, like, 40 clips a month off the pod. So we’ve had we’ve had that, you know, having people clip parts of the pod, uh, two, two clips going out every single day.

We’ve had advertising on other podcasts. We’ve obviously had like just sharing via our own social media channels, newsletter channels. So I think we’ve I think we’ve tried pretty much all of it. Um,

01:07:49.660 — 01:07:51.859 · Speaker 2
what was the there was one other thing that we tried

01:07:53.620 — 01:08:07.930 · Speaker 2
slipping in my mind now, but I think it was like it was. It was paid ads via Facebook. Okay. Which didn’t yield like great results to be honest because it also it depends what you, what you trying to measure with your

01:08:09.370 — 01:08:52.090 · Speaker 2
uh with your marketing. Yeah. And to me podcasting has changed significantly like over the years. You know, initially you were really focused on downloads and podcasting was mostly in audio format. Whereas today podcasting isn’t an audio format anymore. It’s actually mostly video. So paying for views is a very different thing than paying for downloads.

So it feels to me like the game has changed, but we are always, always trying out new things. I think that’s the only way that you can grow as show. There’s no real sort of silver bullet for it. We’ve even had some guests on and I must say, even like with guesting, I can’t say that it has had a huge impact on our numbers,

01:08:53.130 — 01:09:13.040 · Speaker 2
but I think ultimately it’s the accumulation of all these things. So my advice always to anyone trying to grow a pot is like, you have to just kind of try all of it until you see what works. Some things will deliver more results than others, but if you are putting like, you probably have to think about it from a long term perspective, and then it’s just the accumulation of everything that you’re doing.

01:09:13.200 — 01:09:44.480 · Speaker 1
And your podcast is also really a partly entertainment as well. You know, it’s not just information. It’s it’s watching you guys interact. It’s it’s the style. It’s it’s all of that. So in a sense, it’s it’s a bit different from advertising a branded podcast or something like that. That’s got a very specific, different purpose.

Um, but that kind of brings me into it is, is how does it affect the rest of your business? The, the speaking economy and, and all of that stuff that you’re doing?

01:09:44.520 — 01:09:47.840 · Speaker 2
Yeah, yeah. It’s been an interesting journey because

01:09:49.760 — 01:09:51.080 · Speaker 2
I struggle to

01:09:52.470 — 01:10:15.870 · Speaker 2
Directly tie revenue to the pod. Yeah. So we’ve we’ve always been putting money into it, um, knowing that it’s a brand building exercise and that we are building those relationships with people off the back end of it. But I can probably directly track maybe five keynotes, I think, to the podcast specifically.

01:10:15.990 — 01:10:16.670 · Speaker 1
Yeah.

01:10:16.990 — 01:10:31.070 · Speaker 2
It’s always it’s almost always felt like it’s not a revenue generating tool. It’s just a bond building tool for us. And that when we get to the event, there’s always someone who’s listening to the pod and they come up to us and they talk to us about it and how amazing it is for them.

01:10:32.630 — 01:10:43.870 · Speaker 2
I can’t speak for John, but like for me, that’s always been the case. Um, never as a, as a, a front loading sort of revenue generator, but more as a bond build on the, on the back end of.

01:10:43.870 — 01:10:46.990 · Speaker 1
It, but not what you want the brand building the.

01:10:47.230 — 01:11:56.490 · Speaker 2
Definitely. That’s why we’ve been happy to continue putting money into it as well. And then about two years ago, we were signed with Africa Podcast Network. They managed quite a few different podcasts in the country. And so they have like, you know, nice distribution deals and they also work with advertisers.

So they have been able to bring advertisers onto the show. So we get to take more of that money and reinvest it back into the show. But it really it’s been brand building above. I’d say directly tying it to keynote revenue. Yeah. And what I was going to say is to the point where we’ve we’ve toyed with the idea in the past of should we actually just make the podcast private?

And part of the appeal of the podcast becomes that it’s not a publicly available thing. Like, you actually, you kind of get invited into the podcast when you attend keynotes and workshops and you are part of the newsletter that it becomes this behind the scenes of the work that we do, and it really is kind of leveraging the relationship component of a lot more than the.

01:11:59.050 — 01:12:00.690 · Speaker 2
Revenue building side of it.

01:12:00.730 — 01:12:01.410 · Speaker 1
Yeah, I.

01:12:01.690 — 01:12:02.810 · Speaker 2
Know we’ve just told you that.

01:12:02.850 — 01:12:17.490 · Speaker 1
I quite like that idea, the bit of exclusivity. Um, and you can use it a bit more as like a community builder. Uh, in a sense, there’s something about that that I quite like, but I think that’s another.

01:12:17.690 — 01:12:18.210 · Speaker 2
Thing appealing.

01:12:18.210 — 01:12:38.370 · Speaker 1
Right? Yeah. There’s something really appealing about the idea of doing that. It’s probably a different discussion though. But. But yeah, I like that idea. You guys should explore it. Or even doing, you know, like the level two podcast where you really get into stuff you wouldn’t say publicly to everybody.

You know, it’s but maybe there’s another opportunity because.

01:12:39.610 — 01:13:37.640 · Speaker 2
You know, if you if you think about it purely from a growth perspective, uh, if you are trying to grow something in like today’s climate, it needs to be very hooky. It needs to be, like straight into the content. You know, people come there for value. Like that’s what they want. Up front is show me that this is going to be worth my time.

Whereas if you listen to the pod, you know, sometimes it can take up to ten minutes for us to get into, like into the, like the meat of it. By that time, if you are a fresh listener to the pod, you’ve bounced like I would bounce. I’ve listened to the podcasts who have a similar vibe when they have a preamble for ten minutes.

I’m not brought in, so I’m gone. So it almost makes more sense that you then, if you’re going to have that sort of conversation on the pod, will change how you measure what’s important. Maybe it’s not growth, but it’s really just that community aspect.

01:13:38.960 — 01:13:42.480 · Speaker 2
So, you know, it always comes back to, I guess, what you want out of the pod.

01:13:42.600 — 01:13:58.230 · Speaker 1
Yeah, yeah. And and talk to me a little bit about obviously your schedule and physically putting the podcast together. How do you guys do it? Do you have a producer or are you just WhatsApp and say, hey guys, we need an episode this week. How does it go?

01:13:59.830 — 01:14:48.630 · Speaker 2
So we’ve also gone through many iterations of this. One person who has been pretty stable in our team is Jerod. He is our editor for the pod, so he’s pretty good at jumping into Riverside. He’ll grab the audio, mash it up for us, he’ll trim the video. So it’s nicely cut up just for for YouTube purposes as well.

And then around him, I’d say we’ve had sort of a changing roster of people helping us out from social media. You know, someone who was responsible for doing all the clipping of the the pod, which at the moment we aren’t doing because we didn’t actually see the results we wanted. So we’ve taken a step back from that and we’re rethinking what that might look like.

We’ve had a producer where we tried to become quite

01:14:50.220 — 01:15:27.420 · Speaker 2
We were trying to be very focused on the pod, so we had someone who would sit down, do like a week’s worth of research, do a research brief for us before the pod. We would jump on ten minutes before we’d go through all the stories we’d like, understand, you know, the segues between it, and then we’d just like, dude, like, this isn’t us.

Like, we we’re trying to make this mold work, but it just doesn’t feel. It doesn’t feel good. Like, we’ve always been in our best when there are just things that we are noticing and we just come and talk about it on the pod. So that became too stifling and we moved away from that. So the producer component has sort of.

01:15:29.700 — 01:16:16.770 · Speaker 2
Slowly but surely faded away. And we, we kind of back now to where we jump on the pod and we’ll just talk about what we’ve noticed. And we have a WhatsApp group and we’ll pop ideas into that. And I also have, you know, obviously with AI, we we’re quite bullish on it. We use it wherever we can. And one of the things that we do is we do have an agent that is looking for articles that might be relevant to the expense of specifically in the way that we want to speak about the future.

So it surfaces maybe like 15 or 20 every week, and then we’ll choose 2 or 3 that we like. And we can use that as a bit of a backbone or spine for the episodes. But that’s sort of the team. It’s actually we’re running very lean right now, uh, from a production perspective.

01:16:16.810 — 01:16:35.050 · Speaker 1
But it doesn’t sound like you need it to be any more complicated. Um, you know, it doesn’t feel like I agree with you. It’s not your goal to have this shiny floor shared studio. Like where I’m sitting in the moment. It doesn’t. That’s kind of not your purpose.

01:16:36.170 — 01:16:45.210 · Speaker 2
Yeah, I fully agree. Okay. And yeah, we’ll see how it evolves because we’ve now added a third place to the show.

01:16:45.250 — 01:16:53.970 · Speaker 1
Now, is this about to ask you about that? What was the the thinking there? Was it just alignment or did you feel like you needed someone?

01:16:54.010 — 01:17:03.770 · Speaker 2
There’s a few things that happened. One is John and I were saying to each other that we’ve said everything that we can say to each other in 280 episodes, like, there’s nothing.

01:17:03.890 — 01:17:04.410 · Speaker 1
You’ve run out.

01:17:04.410 — 01:17:05.209 · Speaker 2
Of, nothing left.

01:17:05.209 — 01:17:06.209 · Speaker 1
To say, some conversation.

01:17:06.329 — 01:17:40.930 · Speaker 2
At this point. The moment he says something, I’m like, okay, I know, were you going with that? Like, I feel like I can deliver his keynotes. He can deliver mic. You know, we just, you know, you spend that much time with someone, you get to know them really, really well. So we were like, dude, like, we don’t know what to say to each other anymore.

We’ve spent all of our ideas. So one part of it was we need to maybe introduce a bit of fresh blood because it just changes up the dynamic and it also brings in a new perspective. Yeah. So that was one part of the thinking. And Dave is someone that we both know Dave Duarte, he’s super knowledgeable,

01:17:42.250 — 01:17:55.920 · Speaker 2
very smart and we like him a lot. You know like that was the the number one thing that we were thinking about is chemistry, because that’s what the pot is about. You know, everyone always comments on the chemistry before they comment on the content.

01:17:57.080 — 01:18:00.999 · Speaker 2
So so that was one part of it. And then the second part is

01:18:02.360 — 01:18:39.120 · Speaker 2
I’ve noticed or we’ve noticed this trend that podcast these days have 3 or 4 people on the pod, you know, and I think there are these sort of cycles that happen. And this is a new cycle that I’m seeing, and many of the pods that we like to listen to now have 3 or 4 hosts. So Peter Diamandis Moonshot typically has four guys discussing, you know, what’s happening.

And often these podcasts are like two hours long. Um, there’s all in podcasts, which consists almost of four VCs talking about what they are seeing in the world. So we just thought maybe there’s also a bit of a shift in,

01:18:40.320 — 01:18:55.989 · Speaker 2
uh, in the podcasting space that people will want to listen to more perspectives in a short amount of time. So we also just we we testing it out. You know we’re kind of seeing this has always been the philosophy of the expanse of us. Let’s just test this. There’s no real

01:18:56.990 — 01:19:04.590 · Speaker 2
there’s nothing preventing us from experimenting as much as we want to. Yeah. So this is just the next experiment in a long line of experiments for us.

01:19:04.630 — 01:19:19.430 · Speaker 1
Yeah. Well, there’s something else that you did that’s very interesting to me. Is the book from the expansive. Hmm. How did that come about? Yeah. I mean, it’s interesting concept to to take a podcast and turn it into a published medium.

01:19:19.470 — 01:20:38.380 · Speaker 2
So we are both authors, John and I. We’ve written, I think, between the two of us, the books that we’ve written and coauthored, probably about 20 ish books, and we were both kind of looking for the next book. And then at some point we were like, well, we’ve created all this, like, content on the pod. Why don’t we just see if we can’t repurpose it into a book?

And that became quite an exciting thing to take, uh, content from one container and transmutes it into a different container. So we went on this like whole mission of downloading all the pods. I mean, I would have made this super simple, but like, yeah, downloading all the pods, transcribing all the pods.

We had to pay someone for that transcription. I think I would have just blasted through it today. And then we worked with a ghostwriter, because there was just so much content that we wanted to then distill it down into. I think it was about 50 or so sort of short form ideas that just captures the totality of everything that we’ve spoken about.

Because, you know, at some point it was I think at that moment when we started the transcriptions, we had 10,000 minutes of audio to work through. Yeah. So it was huge. And I think for both of us, it was just it almost felt like a,

01:20:39.540 — 01:20:40.699 · Speaker 2
a natural

01:20:41.940 — 01:20:45.090 · Speaker 2
next step for the pod is to say, well,

01:20:46.250 — 01:20:56.330 · Speaker 2
take the audio and put it into book format. And then the book became a bestseller. So that was also good for our egos. Maybe one of the, maybe one of the main drivers was to to add to the ego.

01:20:57.650 — 01:21:09.210 · Speaker 2
But yeah, it was just I think it’s a fun experiment, you know, and like we we think about content repurposing all the time. And this is the ultimate form of, of content. Repurposing is like putting it into a book and getting it published.

01:21:09.370 — 01:21:15.730 · Speaker 1
Yeah. And did you see any effect on your audience and the podcast side after the book?

01:21:17.170 — 01:21:18.890 · Speaker 1
Do you think it affected that at all?

01:21:20.250 — 01:21:21.330 · Speaker 2
Not really.

01:21:23.130 — 01:22:15.560 · Speaker 2
It, you know, book is like a business card in many ways. And I think when you have a book, it gives you an opportunity to go through a bit of PR and just come to the market with something new. So it was great. From that perspective, I think more than serving our current audience, it gave us a bit of a new audience, and it’s very difficult to know how many of them actually turned into listeners of the expensive.

But we’ve sold lots and lots of books into corporates, which was kind of our thinking was, yes, it’s to put this book into the general public and get into exclusive books and take a lot and Amazon, but it was actually more for us to be able to go to our corporate clients with something new. And that’s exactly what the book has done.

So it definitely served its purpose in terms of what we were trying to achieve with it.

01:22:15.840 — 01:22:41.080 · Speaker 1
Yeah, and talking about corporates, you know, we believe that not everybody should have a podcast, but there’s a lot of corporates out there that’s missing out on big opportunities where they could be just sharing their daily lives with us, and we could all be learning from it and getting value from it.

How do you see it? Do you think corporates are missing an opportunity? Do you think they should stay in their place?

01:22:41.640 — 01:22:46.230 · Speaker 2
If it’s it? Podcasting is a strange world for me that in one,

01:22:47.790 — 01:23:23.229 · Speaker 2
one way of looking at it is it feels very saturated. And when someone launches a podcast for like, oh, like another podcast, and then you have all these memes that go around saying, you know, podcasting equipment should be a lot more expensive because they’re trying to dissuade people from like, starting another podcast.

So it’s on the one hand, that’s when I look at the podcasting world, I feel like it’s it’s saturated. On the other hand, when I look at it, I’m like, there’s just so much opportunity because so many podcasts die out so early. And I mean, you’ll you’ll know this better than most. Most podcasts don’t see

01:23:24.790 — 01:24:13.380 · Speaker 2
or most podcasts don’t exist past the 2020 episode mark. So they die off very early. And I think because of that, it creates a lot of space. Uh, not only because I don’t survive, but also because the content ends up being quite mediocre. So if you can put together something that is really worth people paying attention to it, I think it’s worth exploring.

But you need the commitment to back that exploration because it’s a it’s a tough medium like it is. It’s not that it’s become more video. I would say it’s easier than before. Back when it was just audio like there’s no like built in discovery mechanism. So that was like super, super hard. I always just wish there was some way of, you know,

01:24:14.660 — 01:24:49.610 · Speaker 2
companies just sending traffic to you, but it just didn’t exist. Like you couldn’t get it. Like with even if we were on, you know, Apple’s like home page. We had that once or twice. We’d see a small bump in traffic, but it was never like being found on YouTube where you could just like, go viral and have that opportunity to get in front of like, thousands and thousands of people.

So now that it’s changed, maybe the discovery mechanism is is slightly easier, but it’s still super hard to build a podcast. So yes, I think it’s a huge opportunity. But yes, I think you also need

01:24:51.570 — 01:24:56.770 · Speaker 2
massive commitment. Yeah. If you want to see this thing become a success,

01:24:57.810 — 01:25:00.970 · Speaker 2
what is your take on that? Like what do you how do you feel about it?

01:25:01.010 — 01:25:32.730 · Speaker 1
I really think that if you can build the capacity within an organization to do it long term, because like you say, it’s it’s it’s not something that you’re going to just do for for three months and then see it as a campaign and be over with. It’s got to be something sustained. You’ve got to have someone that can really add value and work on the content and do it in a professional manner.

Um, because at the end of the day, you know, a corporate got their core business.

01:25:33.810 — 01:25:34.890 · Speaker 2
Um, yeah.

01:25:34.930 — 01:26:30.680 · Speaker 1
But from a brand building point of view, I think it’s an amazing opportunity Because if we could get to know the people inside a brand, we might want to, you know, be more associated with that brand or take that brand’s services more seriously. Um, so I do see it as, as a way for businesses to, to present themselves in a really, really clear manner.

Build relationships like what you guys are doing. Um, it would be a bit different for a brand, but I see it as an opportunity, but not all brands to do it. I’m not saying that it’s it’s like a magic wand, but yeah, if I just think of my career in, in television and advertising, some of the most valuable moments in my career were sitting down with CEOs and just having a coffee.

So they do have value to add, um, to people out there.

01:26:30.680 — 01:26:37.999 · Speaker 2
And yeah, I think locally has also done a really good one. Um, so for a while they were running a

01:26:39.880 — 01:27:58.989 · Speaker 2
very specific health focus pod, and I forget who the main host was, but it’s like they took a pretty well known host like he. I think he hosts some sort of like morning show somewhere, you know, so they had that sort of anchor and then they would bring in different people to talk about different aspects of health.

Uh, I was on the show talking about, I think, resilience and adaptability at some point, but I thought that was very well executed. But they they had the commitment of a studio that was set up proper, like guys coming in like yourselves, setting up the studio. Um, it stayed like that. So they didn’t set up every single time displays the back like the full shebang.

You know, so they really thought it through. It wasn’t just like quickly sort of put together how it’s going to do something. Um, and I think they’ve even launched one of their CEO now as well. And then A16 Z I don’t know if you’ve heard of them, but they are a big, uh, venture capital firm Overseas and I have an amazing podcast and they podcast all about staying on the edge of technology and innovation, and they bring in incredible guests.

But I can imagine that they get it. So much exposure through that podcast to potential companies they could invest in, and

01:28:00.350 — 01:28:20.150 · Speaker 2
it probably works out in their favor in that if you listen to the pod for long enough, like you want them to invest in your company. So like they become your first go to, you know, yeah, they they get preferential options on on who they want to invest in. So yeah, I think it’s definitely a good tool if you can think it through and execute on it.

01:28:20.150 — 01:29:43.610 · Speaker 1
Well yeah I mean we obviously now I’ve got a TV background. So before podcasts were big, we we did a lot of talk shows. And to me these days podcasts and talk shows are kind of the same thing, you know. And we we did a talk show for eons for a brand a while ago, I don’t want to get into everything we do, but. And we ended up turning the TV show into a podcast as well, and vice versa, because they work in all the mediums and that that did really well for them.

You know, that that repurposing story that we were talking about earlier was was really powerful and that that scenario and again, just brought this opportunity to see behind the curtains a little bit of a brand and get to know their people a bit better. Um, I did this amazing thing also with, um, redefined properties years ago.

We did a mentorship show, you know, and we took Mark Wayne, and the guy started this incredible business, and he was the host, and he interviewed all his CEO buddies, and we had Arnold Schwarzenegger on the show. And, you know, we I don’t know, we we went quite big. And today that would have been a podcast, you know, and we probably would have gotten a lot more traction out of it on, on YouTube today than what we did broadcasting it and wherever we broadcast it.

That’s, um. Yeah. And that brand really pushed into it. Yeah.

01:29:43.650 — 01:29:53.770 · Speaker 2
What do you think? Like, what is a podcast today? Is it a format where multiple people are on a show? Not even multiple people? Because some people have a solo podcast. So is it?

01:29:55.210 — 01:29:55.490 · Speaker 1
Yeah.

01:29:55.530 — 01:29:57.930 · Speaker 2
I don’t even know how I would define a podcast.

01:29:58.010 — 01:30:02.330 · Speaker 1
Like, I think we should just scrap the word now. Um, because.

01:30:02.370 — 01:30:34.730 · Speaker 2
It honestly feels kind of useless to me. Um, absolutely. When I think of blooming, there’s a lady that I follow, Tess Barclay. She has a solo show, so it’s just her starting recording. I almost feel like if you have one of these, like, then that’s a podcast when it doesn’t have one of these. It’s not a podcast, but.

So she sits and talks to the camera, which is just a normal video, but she calls it a podcast. But it’s not an audio only. So therefore it’s not like a Spotify podcast. It’s on YouTube mostly. So it’s so it’s so difficult to know these days.

01:30:34.770 — 01:30:35.410 · Speaker 1
Like, yeah.

01:30:35.410 — 01:30:37.880 · Speaker 2
I think word has become so ambiguous.

01:30:37.920 — 01:30:48.800 · Speaker 1
Yeah. It is. To me it’s either talk. Audio or it’s talk video or it’s it’s a format of some sort of style. Yeah. Yeah, it’s really is. It’s content.

01:30:49.360 — 01:30:49.960 · Speaker 2
It’s amazing.

01:30:50.000 — 01:31:03.720 · Speaker 1
It’s the same as YouTube. You know, people always have this differentiation of, oh, we’re producing for YouTube or we’re producing for TV, but YouTube is TV now, and we’ve just got to get over the fact that there’s a difference. Yeah. Um, yeah.

01:31:04.040 — 01:31:20.360 · Speaker 2
Uh, TV, TBN is a good example of that. So they were recently acquired by OpenAI. Yeah. And I think they were saying it was a $100 million deal, if I remember correctly at the time was huge. Like they they were doing like,

01:31:21.560 — 01:32:02.070 · Speaker 2
I don’t wanna lie to you, but I think it’s $100 million. So they and when you go look on YouTube so they are a YouTube first podcast. All it is is well, I mean all it is, it’s a proper studio production with high tech cameras shooting these guys, and they do a three hour live stream every single day. But their numbers aren’t huge.

They pull like 5 to 8000 views per video. But that was still enough for OpenAI to justify acquiring these guys for, like, a lot of money. Yeah, but that, you know, that is not a it’s not a small production. Like that’s a serious effort going into a like podcast.

01:32:02.270 — 01:32:25.190 · Speaker 1
And from the entertainment world point of view, podcasters, if we now call them that, have really gained traction. I mean, Netflix is acquiring podcasts. Um, yes. Recently talking to the gall hanger guys in the UK, they’ve been commissioned by Netflix to produce content for them. So it again blurs, blurs the lines.

Where does podcasts start?

01:32:25.230 — 01:32:26.470 · Speaker 2
Yeah, big time.

01:32:26.510 — 01:32:38.020 · Speaker 1
Producers and and and production companies like us are going, well, if podcasters are going to get our jobs, maybe we should podcast, you know. So. So yeah.

01:32:38.060 — 01:32:49.140 · Speaker 2
I think you guys play a vital role at the moment in terms of ideation, because that to me feels like the only real defensible.

01:32:51.780 — 01:32:55.380 · Speaker 2
Moat I guess, or like, um.

01:32:56.500 — 01:34:24.889 · Speaker 2
It’s like the only advantage you can really create in my perspective is that you need to hone in on your format and angle. Yeah, very, very, uh, creatively and in like a focused way. So like the redefined properties, one that you were speaking about, like there’s a format behind it that’s very clear. Yes.

Because yes, we can have two people talking, but, uh, you can do it in this format, or you can do it like subway takes where the guy is sitting on the train and doing a short interview. And that’s also a subway takes a considered a podcast, but it’s literally a dude with a like he’s being filmed on a probably a phone.

He’s sitting on the subway in New York talking to people on the train. And he’s gone viral many, many times. But what differentiates him is the fact that he’s talking to someone is that he’s taken a new format. He’s doing it in a different kind of way. And I think for many organizations, that’s the difficult part, is figuring out what is the form, what should the format look like to be interesting to people in a world where attention is so scarce and so fleeting?

And I think that’s the the role that, um, companies like yours can play, which is you see so much of it that it’s much easier for you to go through pattern recognition and go, oh, this format is going to be the best. And like, we can help you tweak that versus you having to think about it from your very limited perspective.

01:34:25.010 — 01:34:41.560 · Speaker 1
I’ll put it this way. We had a client recently say to us, they just they want to do a podcast. But please, no, no plastic orchids, please. You know, because they’ve seen so many podcasts and all look exactly the same.

01:34:42.679 — 01:34:43.440 · Speaker 2
They are. They all look.

01:34:43.679 — 01:35:35.550 · Speaker 1
They’ve identified the plastic orchids that sold at Mr. Price obviously, for really cheap. Has appeared in every podcast, you know. So yeah. No. Absolutely. I mean it is about that now. It’s, it’s we can’t just have two people sitting around the table. It’s got to be produced. You’ve got to have a point.

Like you guys were intentional about your style. Um, that needs to be brought across, that people need to be able to do that. Um, and that’s what we’ve been doing. Just it wasn’t called podcasts was called TV, you know. So it’s just the same thing. It’s just different, different angle. Um, and to me, also one of the interesting things is a lot of these very big podcasts that you see internationally all run by x TV people because it’s it’s the same skill set.

01:35:35.590 — 01:35:36.790 · Speaker 2
Makes total sense.

01:35:37.030 — 01:35:57.310 · Speaker 1
Yeah. I mean the rest of history guy is x BBC executive you know. Mhm. Um because we get content we get audiences. So um, yes, the the creator economy is very new for some of us, but it’s the same thing at the end of the day and, and reach and frequency.

01:35:57.310 — 01:35:58.950 · Speaker 2
And transferable skill, you know.

01:35:58.990 — 01:36:06.310 · Speaker 1
Yeah. And I think that’s where the brands have kind of not done the transition. Some of them is they still see.

01:36:06.350 — 01:36:06.870 · Speaker 2
Yeah.

01:36:06.910 — 01:36:20.350 · Speaker 1
Yeah. They still see the traditional medium as the only credible way to to do messaging. Um, others haven’t. Others have fully gone over to the dark side. But, uh, there’s a lot that still needs to happen.

01:36:20.390 — 01:36:27.110 · Speaker 2
Well, I think if you look at even if I, if I look at what’s happening in the YouTube space right now, there’s a

01:36:28.830 — 01:36:54.580 · Speaker 2
huge proliferation of very niche skills in the YouTube space. So, like, uh, it’s probably the number one thing that’s on my mind. I want to do a lot more video just in my in my personal capacity. Uh, I enjoy sort of the documentary style of creating video. It’s something that if I had a lot more time, I’d spend it, you know, most of it doing that.

But what I’m seeing is

01:36:55.900 — 01:38:01.340 · Speaker 2
YouTube thumbnail creators being paid $500 to create a thumbnail. Like it’s not. You can’t just go into AI, ask it for a quick thumbnail and think that’s going to be sufficient. Like, these guys are becoming their own little celebrities. Like the YouTube thumbnail dude, the YouTube strategist dude, the YouTube retention like strategist dude, whatever.

Like it’s like, you can’t just get a guy that does YouTube for you. You have the videographer that does it well. You have the editor that makes sure it’s like looking good. It’s the the guy sometimes who’s maybe the color grading it, who isn’t even the editor, but the editor is editors responsible for the retention and the pacing and the storytelling behind it.

And then the thumbnail. You know, like it’s you have all these niche but like, very in-demand skills for something as simple as creating a YouTube video. And I think it’s just the same thing in the podcasting space. You know, there’s you need all of these layered skills in order to produce a good podcast.

And I think just in most organizations, those skills don’t exist, which is why they need to get people like you to go and do it for them.

01:38:01.380 — 01:39:19.090 · Speaker 1
Then you need people to help out. Um, and it’s because it isn’t anymore. Just switching on your cell phones and recording and expecting success. Um, yes. If you’ve got a phone and a mic, you can go for it. And that’s what we love about it is that this is a low barrier of entry. And if you’ve got the dedication and the, the the willpower, you will be successful no matter what tech you use.

But if you want to come in and do it right from the start, then chat to the experts. You know, um, get the thumbnail. Expert and thumbnail is incredibly important. Uh, we also explain it like this. You know, in the past, we had broadcasters that brought you an audience. Now we’ve got to bring our own audience.

So that whole team in the broadcast that made sure that that happened is now our jobs. Uh, and, and we’ve got to do what they used to do, which is bring the audience. Um, and then they then serve that audience with good content. Um, and that used to be a whole organization to do that. And now we’re expecting individuals and creators to do it.

It’s a little bit lopsided, if you ask me.

01:39:19.130 — 01:39:35.960 · Speaker 2
It’s tricky man. It’s tricky. Yeah. I’ve been I’ve been creating content since 2013 ish. Uh, and I still I still feel like I’m learning so many new things all the time. I still feel like I haven’t cracked it. Uh.

01:39:38.240 — 01:39:51.679 · Speaker 2
Like I say, YouTube has been in my mind for like two years, and I’ve been working with YouTube coaches, you know, to help me, like, get better at scriptwriting and a lot of this, like, a lot of the things I’m, I’m good at because

01:39:52.880 — 01:40:01.120 · Speaker 2
of my job. Like I stand in front of audiences. So speaking to a camera for me is a very natural thing. I don’t struggle with that kind of, you know, uh,

01:40:02.480 — 01:40:13.520 · Speaker 2
getting on camera, talking based on a script that’s easy to me. Even the scripting is not that hard. I’m used to telling stories and finding engaging ways of communicating an idea,

01:40:15.280 — 01:40:40.830 · Speaker 2
but working with the coaches, like, I’ll be like, here’s my script, and I’ll be like, you’re not opening enough curiosity. Gaps like this hook isn’t strong enough. And like, you know, for me it feels great. Like, but they look at it, they tear it apart, and then they look at the video and they’re like, oh no, like your energy saved here.

Like it’s just after all these years, I feel like I’m still not even close to being a good creator. There’s so much that goes into it.

01:40:40.830 — 01:40:42.310 · Speaker 1
And and I mean, that’s.

01:40:42.430 — 01:40:42.710 · Speaker 2
Just.

01:40:43.510 — 01:41:03.950 · Speaker 1
And sometimes you could do all of that and but it doesn’t work at all either. So you could you can do it all. Perfect. But, um, your audience is your audience. They don’t they don’t care about this or that. They just care about it. Are they entertained? Are they getting value? And do they want to see more? Yeah.

01:41:04.310 — 01:41:27.470 · Speaker 2
Um, I think the fortunate thing for us today is that we get to try again tomorrow. You know, it’s like you never know. That’s why it’s worth iterating all the time. Because you never know what format is going to hit and what’s going to resonate with the audience. Uh, but it’s just iteration. And, like, I think eventually you get to that point where you’re like, okay, now this is starting to work.