The Storytelling Chimp | Christopher Phin | Full Battery Media

I sat down with Christopher Phin to dismantle the idea that we’re just "content creators" in a digital factory. Chris nailed it: we are Pan-Narrans, the storytelling chimps. We’ve been sitting around fires, and now microphones, sharing truths to make sense of a chaotic world. We dived into why a motorcycle trip isn't just about the bike, but a son honoring his father, and how shifting your physical perspective changes the entire narrative of a photo.

We explored the "cruel mistress" of the algorithm and why chasing trends leads to burnout. Chris dropped serious wisdom on format as the secret to longevity,  it’s the container that lets you pour passion into something predictable for your audience but soul-fulfilling for you. Whether it’s the intimacy of a podcast or stepping into someone else’s shoes - literally, in my case, when I spent a day in drag, it all comes back to intent. If you have a mission, you aren’t just filling a feed, you’re building a legacy of human connection.

What is one "truth" about your life that you’ve been afraid to name, and how would telling that story change things for you?

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

So I think consistency beats almost everything in podcasting. You know, if you make another one of my phrases, not my phrases, but phrases that I love is the perfect is the enemy of the good or uh done beats perfect. I think just get stuff out and make yourself do it and set a cadence and make yourself do it because that forces you to produce content and it build an audience that understands it's going to get content from me. So consistency is one. Quality is the is is another. And that doesn't have to mean like, you know, buy an expensive mic or record in a studio. It's just like let's not uh piss off our audience by having tinny crappy echoey audio, but also that quality can be about the quality of conversations, the quality of connection as well. It has to be like some heart and soul in here as well. And the third one, I'm afraid, is just luck. Genuinely, I think one of the huge things that separates the sheep from the goats in most media outcomes is luck. Now, I'm an enormous believer in luck. However, there is a corollary to that, which is that I believe you can make your own luck to a certain extent. You can put yourself in a position for luck to find you. You can be open to opportunities, open to connections and growth and everything else.

SPEAKER_00 1:15

Well, welcome everybody back to the Full Battery Media podcast. I have a repeat guest, but not on this podcast, from one of my other podcasts that came back. Uh, can you tell people who you are and a little bit about what you do?

SPEAKER_01 1:26

So my name is Chris or Kit. Um, I have been working and publishing my whole career. I'm now 45. I started when I was 20 something. Um, but I've had lots of different jobs over that career. The one thing, the only thing as I've been sort of uh in the process just now of looking for a new permanent position, as I try to synthesize what it is I do. It sounds really wanky, but the only way I've put you can possibly describe a common narrative thread through all the things I've done in my career is as storytelling. I've worked as a writer, journalist, editor, editor-in-chief, producer, exec producer, head of, head of, head off. But the thing that really unifies all those approaches is, you know, finding interesting stories and telling them really well. And to be clear, those stories don't have to be, you know, true, crime, exciting. It's, you know, what is what's the what's the reality of a thing? What's the truth of a thing? Where do we find the humanity in a thing? And how do we articulate that through the best medium possible and in the best way possible?

SPEAKER_00 2:21

I was teaching a class for content creators at a university. And everyone came in and they all took the class, and it was it was a good group of people. And I was like, why are you here? And people were like, I want to become a famous content creator. And I was like, okay, don't, don't they all? You know, but I said, Well, what stories are you gonna tell? And I had to help people break down the things that were important to them. And I've talked about this before. There was one kid in the class who had a had a um a car that he loved, and it was a uh a Subaru WRX. And he talked to me about the car and like how you know the car was super meaningful to him because there was a family connection and it was something he worked on with a family member. And like what was what stood out to me was that there was a story there, and he was able to do something passionately with it. And I was just like for most people, they're like, oh, it's just a car. It wasn't just a car. One of the best videos I've ever seen was a video of um done, I believe it was sponsored by GoPro. It wasn't sponsored by them, but they edited it, edited it. Um, it was this guy, and it was about him riding royal infields uh on the highest road in India. And so they they they go and they it beautifully filmed. They ride from this one city all the way to this road that is literally the highest road in the world. And the story talks about how this guy did this because his father had recently passed, and this ride was something that his dad had always wanted to do and never did. And right there, it was just like, it's just a motorcycle video. No, man, that's a soul-touching narrative about why this everyday journey is so important for someone.

SPEAKER_01 4:17

Well, it reminds me of two things. One is I wrote a tutorial years and years ago when I was writing for Computer Magazine about uh photography, and it was kind of about less about the ways to it was mostly about you know how to use a smartphone to take good photographs. So it was the kind of practical bit you want. But I included one section which was on kind of photography as an art form tips as well, and so like onanistic to quote myself back to myself. But one of the tips I remember writing that I thought was true then, think is true now, is that through the acts of taking photographs or filmmaking or recording audio or writing a story or whatever, you're making so many choices about the framing of the thing that you're looking at. And the tiny example I gave was like if you're taking a picture of a kid, taking that picture of the kid from like you know, if you're just like standing there and you hold up your camera and point out at the kid and take the photograph, then you've got a photograph of the kid, sure. But if you get down to their level and you're at their level and you're looking at them, you get a very different photograph and you're telling a very different story about the experience of being a kid. And I think that so often we default to our natural viewpoint, standing up, looking at a kid, taking photographs, but actually there are so many more viewpoints to take. And that's part of the business of telling stories. But I think that business of telling stories is like fundamental to us as a species. There's a really one of my one of my favourite authors is Terry Pratchett, who wrote the Discworld series. He actually collaborated with uh Ian Stewart and Jack Cohn on a series of books called The Science of Discworld, which blends real-world science and the kind of fantasy magical world of his uh creation. And in one of those books, the they said a thing that really resonated with me, which was to describe humans not as Homo sapiens, not as wise man, but as pan narans, as the storytelling chimp. And that really, I think, gets to the absolute soul and center of what we are as a species. To call ourselves wise man is hubris hubris in the extreme. But we are storytelling chimps. We sit around and we ook and we show people where the ripe fruit is and we share experiences in the best way we can. But so much of what powers our culture and our identity and everything we are comes down to the power of stories. And those stories sometimes are, yes, Disney. You know, it's what you see on a big screen, but the mere act of talking to somebody over a coffee, even if the semantic content of that conversation is null, even if you're doing the uh another day, another dollar, oh yeah, how are you? Oh yeah, weather's a bit shit. Like, even if that's all you're doing, the semantic content is pretty null, you are still telling stories about your relationship with that person, about the context of the situation you're in, all that sort of stuff.

SPEAKER_00 6:48

I love that. And I love I want to come back, touch a couple things right there. First of all, I love the perspective. Uh, first off, I I watched this one video. I went to buy a drink from my wife the other day, and I was standing so much taller than the two people who were serving me the drink. And I was looking at this perspective of like upward down. And that's sometimes, and when I take photos, it's always from that angle. You know, I'm always at this higher perspective. But I I watched this video the other day that someone put a um it was like an N360 cam on the dog and let the dog just go out and around. And it was just like so world weird to see that world from a different perspective. I remember when I was a kid, uh my parents worked at this university, and it was the biggest place in the world. It was huge. It was a giant college, it was this place that it was just like absolutely enormous. And I went as an adult to visit the place that I grew up. I walked across the campus in like a minute and a half. It was a small college, but to me as a child, it was this this this huge place.

SPEAKER_01 7:56

And we have all and be able to and anticipate those perspectives in others as well, and to think about how the world looks like from their perspective. That's step one. Step two is then to you know mod modify behavior and you know that's that's how we combat prejudice, how we combat various phobias. But but even just recognizing it is a step that a lot of people don't take, but they should, because not only does that uh aid our greater humanity, but it's more fun.

SPEAKER_00 8:23

Like if you can see the world from somebody else's perspective and try to understand how that looks like my last year, probably the most fun thing that I did last year was my wife had a show with our friend uh Tony. And Tony is uh probably one of the most amazing musicians I know. Tony also is uh the the drag queen honey gluttony. And so at that show, um, my wife, it was coming up on Woman's Day, and we decided that we wanted to make some content, and she was like uh because we'll talk. Sometimes I'll I'll go with her to shows and help her, you know, get in and out. And she's like, You gotta slow down. You don't know how hard it is to walk in this heels and then this dress, you know, and she'll do makeup for two and a half hours, three hours sometimes before each show. And so we sat down and I said, What if, and she and I had this idea, what if uh I at this show, you know, go through this this transformation and see what it takes for her to get ready at each each show. And showed up and Honey Gluttony had a wonderful makeup artist that helped me. It was a three and a half hour like sitting there, getting all the makeup done, getting into the dressing. It was fun, it was interesting. But then I had to sit there and it was wild, such a wild experience, like walking out. Some of the things that I was really blown away by was just seeing the different perspectives. One is that I was having men stare at my breasts the whole time. And I was like, I'm not that good looking of a woman, but like you guys are still staring at me, you know? And then the second thing was like, how wonderfully validating all of these ladies were. These women. I was in the elevator and there was this old Vietnamese woman next to me, and she looked up at me, and I was obviously uncomfortable riding this elevator down after getting my makeup done.

SPEAKER_01 10:17

Looked up at you at a vertical angle, I'm sure.

SPEAKER_00 10:19

Looked up at me in the sweetest little voice. She says, You look beautiful. And that was it. And then I was just like, what a sweet thing to say. And then I was just blown away by the challenge of, you know, wearing the heels and like I was so excited at 4 p.m. we finished my makeup, and the show's not till 10. And I just sit there in this makeup for all these hours. But what was powerful was that I got to step into someone's shoes. And I think that one of the beauties, right? And the beauty of being able to like, that's what cinema is. That's what film is, is being able to step into someone else's shoes. That's what great storytelling is. You can see the world through someone else's uh, you know, story. You can see it from their perspective.

SPEAKER_01 11:03

I think that's interesting as well, because you just had a tiny taste of that experience there of experiencing what life is like uh in a different gender. Tons and tons of my friends are trans uh or non-binary, and I uh had so many interesting conversations, whether they are AMAB or AFAB, and understanding the experience they have as they transition. Um, some of them are in a uh part way along that journey, some of them are very far along that journey, and the the way people react to them is incredibly different. One of my friends is a trans man, and I had a conversation with him about him feeling safe walking around at night, and which is an interesting experience because, of course, as men, we are used to not feeling particularly threatened as we walk around at night. Very different experience for women. This was somebody who was born as a woman or who had lived as a woman for a long time before he transitioned, and yet, uh, and who you wouldn't know for a moment to look at him that he was anything other than cisgender. But if he is having the same experience of feeling nervous walking around because he thinks people are going to clock him as trans, or he thinks he's gonna get uh unwanted attention. In part, there's that little uh subroutine running from when he experienced the world as a woman, it makes you realize how how difficult the experience is for everybody who's not just assisted to walk around at night.

SPEAKER_00 12:35

I'm glad that we were talking about all of this because when I was teaching my content creation class, I I l told my students that there is power in telling stories. There is power in being able to share this information, especially in a time where um misinformation is on the rise and people are using our own ignorance to really um hurt us as a as a collective society. I want to ask you a question. You know, as people are using these stories, uh using this content to to tell stories, what what separates someone who can just tell, you know, who just makes content from someone who tells truly great stories and makes an impact?

SPEAKER_01 13:28

It's really a simple definition, I think. Stories have intent. Content is just stuff. And sometimes this the that stuff can have narrative, but it can have emergent narrative, it can have unintended narrative, um, or meta-narrative even, uh, where if you're just like making stuff, making content without intent, without an intent to tell stories, sometimes those stories will happen without you really noticing it. And maybe the stories you're telling aren't the ones you intend to tell. But I think if you are in the business of storytelling, then you have a mission and a purpose and a vision and an idea of where you want to go and what you want to do and how you want to say it and what it is you want to say and what you want to elicit and how you want to bring people along on that journey with you. If you think about storytelling as an ancient art, right? Our most ancient art of sitting around the campfire and telling stories to each other. The business of the storyteller, the classic vision of the storyteller, um, in the flickering light of the flames, and everybody's sitting around looking up at them, that is somebody who is bringing you along on the journey. And, you know, if we think about our Ur fables that we have as a society, then we are telling the reason storytelling is important in that context is it's a way of warning us, a way of building identity and a way of us building that understanding as a culture and a society. I remember when the uh the right started to gain traction in America. I remember, and this was so long ago that I was still posting on Twitter, I remember posting that I love the fact that we have the word demagogue, right? Demagogue is somebody who appeals to the emotions and how they seize political power. And I remember thinking it's great we have that word, because the very fact that that word exists means that we know what that person is. We have seen this bastard before and we've named it. And that's the first step in trying, like naming something is a first step in taking power over something. And it's that same thing with storytelling. If we're telling the same story in different ways, if we're uh warning people about the big bad wolf, you know, if we're if we're if we're thinking about how we structure and and shape the kind of society we want to be for good and for ill, and that's where you come back into with your point about misinformation, especially the rise of AI-generating just now. Storytelling has unrivaled power because our brains are wired to engage with stories, unrivaled power to change our minds. Like we we don't respond particularly well to facts and to statistics, we respond to narrative.

SPEAKER_00 16:09

The the the thing that I'm thinking about with this is that as we create those narratives and how we're sharing those narratives, um sometimes one of the things that I found is that I don't always have clarity about what it is that I'm trying to tell or what stories need to be told. And I will the story sometimes unfolds in front of me, and I simply have to be committed to the art of capturing it, of being present to it, because I'll whenever I've come in with an idea, this is the story I need to tell, and then I've turned the camera on, and another story emerges, and I think that there's an honesty. I have um I have a tattoo right here. It's a it's a sword, fire sword. When I was younger, I was living in this town, and these monks came to do a these Tibetan Buddhist monks came to do this empowerment. They were gonna anoint all these people and bless them with the spirit of the medicine Buddha. And I went to this ceremony because I wanted to be connected to the medicine Buddha. I thought that would be so cool. And so I showed up, and the monks looked at us and they said, in meditation, we were told to do a different attunement. We were told to do the Manjushri Buddha attunement for all of you. And people who don't know, the Manjushri Buddha is the Buddha of truth. It's the embodiment of the truth, and that truth can be known, truth can be seen, and truth can be experienced. And not the truth of like what does the book say, but of lived experience, the truth of what you experience in that breath, uh if that makes any sense. And I I I think that we should be dedicated to capturing the truth of what we see and the stories that are unfolding, if that makes any sense. Very esoteric.

SPEAKER_01 17:59

It really does. And as soon as you started speaking, uh, I was reminded of one of my guiding principles. I just looked up because I couldn't remember who to attribute the line to, and it turns out you can't attribute it to anybody, it is um variously attributed to lots of different people. But the line is how do I know what I think until I hear what I say? And I think the very act of articulating something is the process by which we gain the understanding of what that thing is. I don't operate by um having a view and then articulating it. I operate by articulating unformed thoughts which are themselves informed by other people. I realize that you know I've worked in podcasting for a few years now, and uh there's lots of different ways for that business to be constituted and lots of different ways to make successful podcasts. But I realized that in my own podcast consumption, the thing that uh that unifies all the shows I listen to is that basically, whether it's a comedy show or a history show or whatever, it's people um attempting to be better, to better themselves. And not in a sort of pious way, not in a not in a hair shirt way, but just like they're trying to understand. They're hungry for understanding for growth and for personal development. Again, I sort of shy away from I dis I actively dislike the sort of like personal growth mindset of you know, growth hacking and you know, but uh the Brian Johnson stuff of like eternal youth and that stuff I actively find unpleasant. It shades into bro culture and and and unpleasant masculinity to me. But getting better about stuff is really important to me. And and that's what happens with me. And I will listen to people, smart people saying and empathetic people and kind people saying things, and then I will consider them and and and process them. And then as I talk about stuff, I can feel the connections being built. And like if you if anyone watches me doing little vloggy things on my Instagram, you'll quite often see me starting a thought and then going, oh, that's what I think, and then being able to like finish the thought and articulate it. And then, you know, henceforth, I have a thought, I have a position, I have a perspective.

SPEAKER_00 20:09

It's one of the things I I notice with my own teams and the content we create, there is this tendency for people to chase trends, you know. But the reality is one of the places I feel this the most is with my daughter's YouTube channel. And it's not my daughter, it's uh we do it together. We do the content for kids. And I love Eilani's little world. It's one of my favorite things to do. And we do all types of fun content. But one of the things that my YouTube's algorithm turned on us horribly. Horribly. It buried our content, especially our reels, where we were talking to these people. And my editors were like, well, maybe we should do, or in my content team, maybe we should do more shocking things or exciting things. And I said, We're talking with scientists that are awesome. We are talking to a NASA rocket scientist who shares with kids about how to make rockets. If the algorithm doesn't love us, I don't give a shit. I'm gonna keep making videos with NASA scientists. We're gonna keep making videos uh telling kids about cool things with animals, and we're gonna keep doing what we do because at the end of the day, I'm not it's not about chasing trends for me. It's about staying true to my the voice that we're sharing. And then seeing, I mean, I'm not saying we're not seeing what clicks and we're not seeing what people are engaging with, but yet you have to figure out how to balance that to stay true to your voice while also making content that people want to listen to. Uh, how do you think people could kind of find that balance? Because I'm still trying to figure it out.

SPEAKER_01 21:48

The balance is is the important thing because I think, especially in a media landscape as we have today, unless you are in the established media uh milieu, which of course is changing and and being And transformed them in lots of different ways. But if you're a sole content creator or a or a small studio of content creators, the challenge we have is that the the algorithm has become the default. We assume that feeding the algo is is the way to get growth because it it's it's it's a sugar rush. It's you know you can put some content up and you can, you can go viral. My God, that phrase, but you you can with um little effort on your part beyond making the content, the algorithm can bring people to your content and expose it to them and grow your audience that way. And that's deli delicious and delightful, and it's really cool when that happens. But I I do think you you can find a balance and it will be different for everybody, which is why it's not really a formula, but you can find a balance between, okay, let's do some things that will feed the algo, that will allow it for example on YouTube, one of the best ways of doing that is to use your shorts because shorts are really good at audience discovery. Um in general is a its biggest strength, as far as I can see it as a content creator, is that it is a vector for surfacing your content to other people more so than anything else. It doesn't exist that same model doesn't exist in podcasting. One of the big arguments in podcasting about the use of video in podcasting, and one of the one of the reasons to do it, if your show format lends itself to it, is because you can put it on YouTube and then YouTube can go and find your audiences. But all that said, that's a new thing. The algo's a new thing, and it it's a cruel mysteries. And you know, we've seen this so often with SEO, with Google's panda update, delisting people, and we'll we're seeing that big shift now with the use of AI in organic search results. Everyone's scrabbling to like stay on top of that wave and not get drowned by it. And that's fine. And do you know what? I think if you don't respect the power of the algorithm, the opportunities of the algorithm, and the and you don't do any work to stay on top of the opportunities and the challenges it presents to you, you're a idiot, frankly. However, I think much more important than that is just setting your North Star, setting your sales, and chasing the thing that feels true and right to you. And that's partly because I think that is the right thing to do strategically, because you're producing high-quality content and actually organically building a core audience that really loves you for the things you do is the single most important thing you can do to build resilience for your output. But it's also just the right thing to do morally. Like as a human being, just focus on making something excellent.

SPEAKER_00 24:51

It leads to this because like coming back to the growth, because if someone's going out and wanting to have stories that are impactful and get out there, you do have to grow. You know, and like where do you think people should put their attention? Should it be the message, their format, or the platform they post on?

SPEAKER_01 25:08

I think it's format. Now, I would say that because that's kind of the thing I do most of the time in my day job as a creative director across different media formats. But I think it's format, and it's format because um it does two things for you. Number one, it forces you to articulate the thing that is special about your offering. If you work out a format for the thing, you're you're being forced to think about, you know, medium cadence, uh duration, editorial franchises, sponsorship opportunities, all that sort of stuff. So that's one reason. But the other reason is it just makes it easier. It just makes it easier. If you've got a shape of a container for every single episode of the thing you do, or every even if you're not thinking episodically, like I have a little channel about e-bikes, and it's this is specifically designed. I started it for two reasons. One, because I'm 45 years old, I should know how TikTok works, but also because I wanted to produce something that was like not beholden to anybody or anything or any trends or anything. I just wanted to like make some fun content just for me. So I but that's not episodic. I just like record every now and then. And you know, YouTube hates that. YouTube doesn't like my channel because even though it's about one subject, which YouTube does like, it doesn't like the fact that it it there's no regularity or cadence to what it appears, but I don't care. But if you have the shape of a container into which you can pour your content, it just means that every episode, every time you hit record, every time you put pen to paper, every time you sit down at your word processor, you're just pouring content into that container time and time again on a predictable shape. And that makes it easier for you, but it also means that your audience can get a sense of what they're gonna get. And you know, that might be as rigid as you know, we ask the same three questions of every interviewee. Like one of my favorite shows is off menu with James Gamble and James A. Castor, where they just ask every other favourite starter main course dessert, side dish and drink, and they talk about it. Sounds quite dull. It's incredibly funny because they are incredibly charismatic and very funny. But there's a very precise format there of just asking these X questions. It doesn't have to be quite as precise as that. But as long as you kind of know where you're starting and know where you're ending, then you can play about in the middle. So yeah, I think format is the is the thing to get right at the start because that will make your job easier and it'll make your content stronger, and then you can start thinking about promotion.

SPEAKER_00 27:29

Right. Well, that's one of the reasons that for me, the format that was most straightforward that I gravitated towards was podcasts. And because I I just love conversations. I love talking to people. And I love the ability of a conversation to explore topics that you might not be able to get through yourself, that you might need someone else's perspective to help you broaden your mind to a degree. But that's why I think why people come to podcasts. You know, you listen so that you can sit there and go, now I've I know my perspectives, and now I've got this other person who's sharing this idea, and I'm challenged. I am being forced to question what I believe and what I think. And that being challenged is one of the reasons I think podcasts, podcasts have become such a strong tool for storytelling, because how challenged can you be with, you know, with a short form video? I'm sure you can. I'm sure that there are people that are really good at it. But when you hear a conversation and you hear someone whose perspective is very different from yours, it forces you to ask questions that are hard. You know, wow, I didn't know that this person, insert whatever that category is that you were uh had a judgment about, has a very different perspective, or this topic that they're talking about has a very different perspective. You know, I I it's powerful like that.

SPEAKER_01 28:55

It is. And I think the things that podcasting do particularly well is consistency, it's quality. It's not necessarily um technical quality, although there is a bar you should probably hit so you you're not like making it actively unpleasant for your audience to listen to. But it's that intimacy, that connection, that depth of engagement that you can have. One of the incredible opportunities that podcasting gives everybody, whether they're a you know a business or or a you know bedroom podcaster, is the opportunity to ask for politely and deferentially for time. Like you you don't get if you in my in the business of podcasting, if I'm doing commercial podcasting, we are constantly challenged, although numbers are low, which they are, but if you're comparing it against the reach you get for short form video or for uh you know uh CPM ads on on Google or whatever, the numbers are the audience numbers are very low, but the engagement is through the roof. And if you imagine like putting, let's say, 150 people, if that's what your podcast gets per week to listen, 150 people in a room and they sit and they listen wrapped to you for an hour, that's nuts. And that ability to, you know, I one of my lines about podcasting is that we're in a unique position to be the part of somebody's day where if they're leaving the house in the morning, they're not thinking, oh shit, I've got to spend an hour and a half pressed up against somebody's sweaty armpit on the tube. They think, finally, this is my chance to listen to the latest episode of this show that I love, that feels like me, that connects me, that expands me, that helps me grow. And it takes a lot of work to get to earn that trust. But once you have, you have got an unprecedented opportunity to sit someday down and go, like I noticed myself, one of one of the shows I I've just gonna stop listening to it now, but that was in my rotation for a very long time, was a very old BBC show called Desert Island Discs, where a celebrities brought on, they asked their their music they would take to Desert Island and they talk about it. And I noticed something in my behavior, which is that once I started listening to that in a podcast rather than as a radio broadcast, I would scroll through the list, I would pick the people that I knew, I'd listen to them, and that was great. But actually, if I then exhausted that list and I had to listen to people that I whose names I didn't know, I actually often had a much better time. And that's the power of being able to say to somebody, look, I know that this is a bit of a tough ask. Like you don't like your your audience listening to this episode right now almost certainly have got no idea who I am. But because you built up the trust where you said, Hey, I'm going to curate some interesting conversations for you. You're going to have to trust me that they're going to be good. Your audience has given you, I mean, so far, about half an hour of their time to sit down and listen to this conversation.

SPEAKER_00 31:47

I had uh a great email today or message on LinkedIn, and it was someone who added me. And he said, Hey, he was really well connected to some people that I was very surprised that I was getting this message. And he said, Sean, I wanted to add you on LinkedIn because I'm trying to reach out to um media leaders in the financial personal finance industry. And I was like, Jesus Christ, I'm like, first of all, I started a podcast about personal finance because I know uh jack shit about personal finance. I am sorry. I know nothing about personal finance. I started it because I was so overwhelmed with all of the stuff that I was seeing in the personal finance space. And I was just going, no one's speaking to people like me. They're just, it's like they're talking to people. I had a guest yesterday on my Barrels and Roots podcast that she's like, I um we got we inherited some money and we inherited a portfolio. And she's like, and there was someone managing it. And like after he passed it to, you know, after we received it, and she was like, and he kept managing it. Like she's like, I'm not the type of person who can have a financial planner. And I was like, hold on, everyone should be able to have someone that can help them with their money. Like, that's one of the things. And I so I started this podcast to kind of, but I didn't know that when I started the podcast. I started the podcast to talk to people so I could learn things about money. And then uh 100 some odd episodes deep, I've talked to some of the biggest thought leaders in the field. Now, here's the thing. When I got that message, it wasn't like any type of if inflation to my ego. It was just this, well, shit. If I have access and someone thinks of me as a thought leader, maybe I can make a difference. Maybe I can start getting people to change the conversations that are being had. Because right now they're not helping the people that need to be helped. We're not getting, you know, the information out that needs to get out about how to help people be. You know, one of the biggest things out there. I was reading this, I was having a guest talk to me, and he was quoting a study that said, one of the biggest things that causes anxiety for people is finance, personal finance or financial stress. And I was thinking, if we could get people this information to help figure out how to get your finances in order, I'm not talking getting billions of dollars. I'm talking that you have a simple plan so you're not living paycheck to paycheck, and that you have an emergency fund and that you're not in crazy credit card debt or student loan debt. If you can have some of those basic tools and we can eliminate some of that stress, isn't that a powerful thing? And I'm one guy who just started a podcast because my eight year old daughter at that time was saying, Daddy, uh, tell me about money. And I was like, shit, I don't, I don't know. But yet now I have people messaging me because they say I'm a I'm a media leader in the personal finance industry. And I still think that's crazy. But too good, if I can lead in on that and make a difference. But my supply is the thing today. It's like, I don't think that people realize that if you start something right now and you lean in on it and you stick with it, you could be uh a leader in the field because we're entering a whole new era of media. And with podcasting, the sky's the limit. Like the the barrier to entry is very low. And I certainly it's very saturated now. But like, dude, I stuck with this stuff because it was important to me, because I really wanted to figure out things so I can put my family in a better place. And like that journey of self-discovery has been the fuel. So I I love podcasting for that, and I love the ability to make a difference.

SPEAKER_01 35:37

I think that connection is so important. It's the parasocial connection thing as well. Like we can connect ourselves to the downside of the interconnectedness of the world these days is that you know our brains literally are not designed to deal with this much bad news, these many connections. If your listeners don't know about Dunbar's number, they should look it up. Basically, the idea that there's a putative uh maximum number of connections that we can maintain as human beings. I think it's about 150. Um because that's you know, we are pandorans, we're stone storytelling chimps. Like we're we're not that evolved for monkeys, to be frank. And there is there is some hard wiring in our brains that you know we the the firmware was only built to deal with this many things, this many people. But uh we can and but so that's the downside, is that we're suddenly uh in exposed to this avalanche of difficult news and and terror horror that we can't really engage with. And yet the flip of that can be something so joyous. You know, I remember I saw a meme a few years ago that was just like um uh you're addicted to your phone. No, I'm addicted to my friends, it's just that they happen to live in my phone. It's really true. Like so like if I if you see me just like sort of like scrolling my phone or typing my phone, it's easy to think, oh, just doom scrolling or whatever. But like I spend a lot of time with my friends at IRL, but I also spend a lot of time with my friends in like group chats or like sending stupid memes or whatever. It's like those connections that we have, those parasocial actually those aren't quite parasocial, but but like your audience, Sean, on this show has a parasocial relationship with you and they they see you as a friend, they trust you, to an extent that has come from earning that. And that connection is hard to build, it takes time and it takes effort, and you know, that it will be a very slow burn. Let's come back to the point about the algorithm. The algorithm is a good, or you know, paid media as well, is the the sugar rush that will get you some vanity numbers and it will get you exposed in lots of different ways. But for example, like in podcasting in particular, a lot of the narrative just now is like, oh, you know, even if your show isn't gonna be a video show, you should still record videos so you can put out clips on reels or TikTok or shorts, which is a fair point and it's true. But also those things don't tend to translate into audience on your podcast. However, I do think it's still worth doing because even though you won't see a clip of me talking to you on this show on Insta Reels and then immediately come and subscribe to your podcast, having been exposed to that reel through a choice the algorithm made. If you see different guests on your show coming out, and and somebody's served that six or seven times, they might just go, eh, Sean Trace guy's got some stuff to say, and might then go and seek you out.

SPEAKER_00 38:21

I had a gentleman came that I invited onto my financial podcast, and he said literal words, I don't know who you are, but you're having conversations with people I like and respect, and I've enjoyed the conversations. And I thought I want to have a conversation with you as well. And I was like, and that right there is the power that I feel comes through the ability to build these relationships and this content. And one of the things that it leads a question that when I have gu, you know, clients that are are trying to build podcasts with me, and they they're starting a podcast, and they look at me and they go, what makes the difference between a show that grows and one that's that stays small? And I don't always know. But one of the things that I think is I think there's a couple of things. First of all, I think it's about authenticity. And I know that word is used a lot, but I think that you you have to be authentic and actually care. I'm not gonna have a podcast about Arabian horses because I don't know a damn thing about Arabian horses except for when I was a kid, my uncle had a farm. Now, does that mean I can't learn? I mean, I I did the same thing with personal finance. I started a podcast I knew nothing about, so maybe I could, but it's not something I'm passionate about. And I would just feel very awkward doing that. You know, I had I was hosting a podcast for my old university, and uh they were really lovely people. I loved everyone I talked to, but I just didn't feel as authentic because I I'm not a big fan of student loans. And like if I'm doing this podcast, you know, people go to that school through student loans. And it just didn't, at the end of the day, it wasn't something I wanted to be putting my energy into just because it wasn't something I felt authentic about, you know? But what makes the difference between a show that grows and ones that stays that one that stays small?

SPEAKER_01 40:17

I mentioned it earlier a little bit. So I think there are three things. If we take authenticity as a given, those three things are consistency. Consistency beats almost everything in podcasting in particular, but in a lot of things as well. You know, we we hear a lot about PodFade, this thing that you'll do, like you'll excited to put out your first episode, and then your second episode, then your third episode will be three days late, your fourth episode will come out a month after it's posted, and then you just kind of stop. And that's fair because apart from anything else, a lot of people don't realize the amount of work that comes after you press the stop recording button on a on a podcast, not just in terms of editing the show itself, but in terms of the publishing, the promotion, etc. etc. But also, so so I think consistency beats almost everything in podcasting. You know, if you make another one of my phrases, not my phrases, but phrases that I love is the perfect is the enemy of the good or uh done beats perfect. I think just get stuff out and make yourself do it and set a cadence and make stuff because that forces you to produce content and it build an audience that understands it's going to get content from you. So consistency is one, quality is another, and that doesn't have to mean like you know, buy an expensive mic or record in a studio. It's just like let's not uh piss off our audience by having tinny, crappy, echoey audio, but also that quality can be about the quality of conversations, the quality of connection as well. It has to be like some heart and soul in here as well. And the third one, I'm afraid, is just luck. Genuinely, I think one of the huge things that separates the sheep from the goats in most media outcomes is luck. Now, I'm an enormous believer in luck. However, there is a corollary to that, which is that I believe you can make your own luck to a certain extent. You can put yourself in a position for luck to find you. You can be open to opportunities, open to connections and growth and everything else. But we like, I get pissed off a lot when I hear because we hear like endless like success stories shared in podcasting or in in other media channels. You know, how do you, you know, it's the Stephen Bartlett effect, Diary Basillo. It's like, how did you get to the what grit determination did you show? What sacrifices did you make? How did you push through to be where you are today? That's all grand. But the survivor bias is through the roof. Like we only hear from people who have made it. We don't hear, you know, there's the famous image of the plane covered in little red dots showing uh damage that was uh uh uh gathered on planes coming back from uh recis in I think World War II. And we see, you know, the Department of War had done this incredibly important piece of data analysis where they mapped all the gunshots that had um had happened, and then like, okay, so if they're being hit here, then we could like armor this part or armor that part, and that will give them a better set. But the big thing, of course, is that they're not measuring the planes that didn't come back. So actually the thing, the the data you're seeing is bad data because it's showing you the things that are survivable, not the things that kill you. And there's so much uh uh and so my point here about luck is I can sit here and say create opportunities for luck to find you, you know, um, build connections, trust that you know, good things will happen.

SPEAKER_00 43:29

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 43:29

You might still end up crashing. You might not make it, you might burn through life savings, you might have an awful experience. And it's really important that we don't just chase success or or lionize success for its own sake.

SPEAKER_00 43:44

I um I recently had a friend and a person who was an advisor for myself um that spent sixteen thousand plus on a series of videos to support his business. 16,000 US. And then his business went under. You know, and that was a painful expense that he thought this content was going to be the thing. The content was going to blow up. And one of the things that I tell people is I have a team that works with me. And I have a, you know, multiple editors, a whole content team that I built, that I do client for uh work as well as my own work. And it is still exhausting for me. And I have been doing this for years, and I am just now starting to get traction. These people do not realize the amount of uh of work it takes, the amount of stress it takes. And like for Aylani's little world, um, you know, the amount of money I dropped into Ayelani's Little World is a lot to get all these videos done, to do everything. But I keep it up for Elisa, Ailani's Little World, especially because my daughter gets to learn some things. First of all, she I I'm paying for her to have these opportunities to speak to these awesome scientists, to have these people validate her as a young creative mind. Um, and you know, and she gets to work. I I let her do some of her own slides. After we make things, she gets to sit there and help with the story. So I'm teaching her about that responsibility. But if I were looking on ROI, like financially, it's low. And I mean, I used to be like, well, maybe we could be like big like Mr. Beast. Man, Mr. Beast is an outlier. He is a massive, massive, massive outlier. And if you think otherwise, you are very, very mistaken.

SPEAKER_01 45:40

But also I think like I think we we have um poor statistical uh articulacy literacy as a society. And for that reason, we you know, if if if somebody tells you the average of anything, you should immediately your first question should be, well, do you mean median mode or or or mean? Like, because there are so many ways of taking not so many ways of taking average, there's three that I know of, there may be more. Again, poor statistical literacy. But the point is that like uh look, taking the median of something is usually so much more uh indicative of eliminative of the actual takeaways you should take from something than taking the mean from something. Because you're right. Like so in podcasting, one of the stats, if you look uh on uh Blueberry publishes their stats. And so uh I think it's currently something like 49 downloads is the mean number of downloads a podcast will get in its first seven days. So you can argue if you get 50 downloads in your first seven days of your podcast, you're doing better than 50% of all podcasts worldwide. That fact is true, but it masks a lie, which is that that number is yes being massively skewed on the high end of like very successful podcasts, but is being more skewed in the low end of people who start a podcast on Anchor or Spotify for Creators as it now is, and do like one or two podcasts and then uh and then stop it, just like then pissing about with their friends. The the data pools in both directions. And but it's your point about Mr. Beast, like it's it's so far out of the norm.

SPEAKER_00 47:10

Let me ask you one last question. Um, looking ahead, how do you see storytelling and podcasting changing for creators who want to stay ahead of the curve?

SPEAKER_01 47:19

Well, it actually comes back to what I think we've spoken about already. And maybe I'm an idiot, maybe I'm naive, and it's no, no, I'm I'm I'm not being sort of coy or self-deprecating when I say that. Genuinely, maybe I'm an idiot and maybe I'm naive when I say this. But I think that focusing on quality, slow growth, authenticity of connection is the way that we'll we'll we'll get through what's coming. Because what's coming is not just pressures of commercialization, siloization, people try to slice the pie up in different ways and you know take more pie for themselves. And the sometimes corrosive power of algorithmic feeds. It's not just all that, because we had all that, and that was still enough of a challenge as it was. But we've also now got the rise of AI-generated content, both in the sense of you know generating content at massive scale that was not possible before, but also the opportunity for that content to be uh manipulative and manipulated. Like we have moved on so quickly as a society from the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and I think we have not begun to see that was you know basically you know, adjust you know, influencing voting by hyper-serving uh ads to very specific people, to very targeted ads that nobody else could see but but them. And if we imagine that, but with AI-generated content, which appears to be you know legit being served individually to people, the potential for that to radically disrupt our society, we haven't even begun, I think, to engage with, or most people haven't at least. So we have so much um pressure from AI Slop, but also from the commercial pressures on storytelling that I think that even though, as we've said, it might not work, you might not be able to build an audience quickly enough or resiliently enough or big enough in order to monetize them. But I think focusing on intentional storytelling is the way that you navigate your way through that. And one of the questions you had been going to ask me, I know, was about uh commercialization and about making money from a channel. And I think that so often uh creatives in particular, uh, they outsource the thought of commercialization. Often that's to ads. We'll just run ads, they think, not realizing that you need to be at a massive scale for the CPM's advertising to make you any sort of money. But actually, I think, and I've seen there are so many opportunities for generating revenue on an incredibly small scale. If you build a podcast for your local community that is just, you know, news from your community, and you get 2,000 listeners and that's it. But that's actually a huge audience for the butcher on your high street to advertise their Valentine's Day special to, and you can make 500 bucks by running an ad for them or doing a sponsored content section with them. And I think thinking in those artisanal, low-food mile kind of ways, thinking about how, and that's an example, but hopefully you can extrapolate from there, thinking about like what's the audience you're going to build? What are the what are the who are they, but also like what services can you reasonably and morally sell to them?

SPEAKER_00 50:50

I love that. And I I I think that people, everyone wants to be the next big you know, Mr. Beast. But you know, one of the podcasts that I'm loving that actually am getting a lot of traction in a very interesting way is my Barrels and Roots podcast that I just started. And it's I started about four months ago, and it's all about wine. And I grew up in wine country in the Napa Valley, and you know, I absolutely love the industry and I love the people who make wine. And I I don't actually drink much, but I loved the art. I love going outside in the middle of crush and smelling the whole area smell like a wine bottle. It's just unreal. And I wish that people could understand and love that as much as I do. So I started that, right? Well, there's not many people doing that, and it's a very niche podcast. And yet I've been able to speak to people that are absolute pillars of the industry. And it was interesting for me because people in that industry are like, wow, this is such a cool thing. I I know you, you're Sean, you're that guy. And I was just like, it's really interesting that you don't have to do a lot to make an impact. You don't have to like to get out that much to be seen. And then it's your choice where you want to go with that. But, you know, I think for monetizing, I think one of the things that's important too for people to realize is that you must build trust first. I know Gary Vaynerchuk had yeah, I there was a great book that came out in the early ages of social media. It was called Trust Agents. Still one of the best books I've written on, I've read on social media, uh, marketing and content marketing. And these guys are like, you know what? If you want to sell to people, you know, you have to find a way to get them to trust you. And that doesn't, that means in the beginning that you're you're not selling. You are giving them content and giving them information to build up that trust. And then once you have it, being very, very intentional about what you sell. This is something my wife and I talk about all the time because we've had brands, my wife is a famous singer, and she has had brands come to her and they go, Hey, would you sell this product? It's this, you know, this beauty injection. And she's like, But I don't do injections myself. You know, why would I want to sell that? You know, and it not that we have anything against it, because if someone wants to go do that and that's their journey, great, but that's not her journey. And she's very intentional about what she wants to sell because she knows if she goes and sells something that goes against her brand, her image, and her beliefs, people she'll lose the trust and you can't get it back.

SPEAKER_01 53:32

Yeah. And I think the talking about the intentionality of selling is really true as well. It can be subtle. And especially if we're operating in podcasting at the high-end corporate level, I've worked with clients in the past who make some very complex, um, expensive, but rarely bought, you know, buying cycles of like five years or more platforms for things. And when you they know that if they go out there trying to basically make a webinar about how great the product is, nobody's gonna listen to it. You've got to give somebody a reason for like, do think about that person walking out the front door and shutting it in the morning. And you what can you do to be the thing that makes them think, thank God, finally, 45 minutes my own. I want to listen to a recent episode of my favorite show, put their earphones in, spend time with you. And if you are frankly making white paper content in a podcast forum, you're doing it entirely wrong, my friend. You need to be thinking first, like, what why would anybody give a shit? Why would anybody give me their time, their attention, their trust? Um, and then maybe if you're a very good boy, you get the chance to move them onto a more commercial footing at some point. But you know, podcasting content marketing is not for direct sales. It's not. You have other channels for that. This is an opportunity to build those trusts and connections to demonstrate thought leadership, but also to make yourself useful.

SPEAKER_00 55:02

Where can people find out more about you and what you offer and what you do?

SPEAKER_01 55:06

Easy thing is at my website, uh, which is chrisfin.com, chrisphin.com, or indeed find me, Chris Finn, on Instagram. I'm also on Mastodon with the same name.