A New Direction for Deep Dive - Let's Chat
25:39 Share

By the way, in case you haven't heard, my brand new book, Feel Good Productivity, is now out. It is available everywhere books are sold. And it's actually hit the New York Times and also the Sunday Times bestseller list. So thank you to everyone who's already got a copy of the book. If you've read the book already, I would love a review on Amazon. And if you haven't yet checked it out, you may like to check it out. It's available in physical format and also ebook and also audiobook everywhere books are sold.

Hello and welcome back to Deep Dive, the podcast where it's my immense pleasure to sit down with entrepreneurs and creators and other inspiring people and we find out how they got to where they are and strategies and tools we can learn from them to help build a life that we love. Now this is a bit of a different episode because this is mostly going to be me doing a bit of a spiel as a bit of an update as to what is actually happening with Deep Dive. So we are now on the eighth season of the podcast. We've been going for over two and a half years now, two years and a bit, and this is

Marks an interesting inflection point. Interesting for me, but I hope vaguely interesting for you as well in the podcast. Essentially, while I have absolutely loved doing the conversations that I've done on Deep Dive and we've had some amazing episodes and you guys seem to be loving them as well, there is a sense in which doing Deep Dive episodes has started to feel a little bit like a job for me. And this was never the intention. The intention was for it to not be a job, was for it to be a fun place where I could have the conversations I wanted to have.

But then as it started to grow, as we started to systemize and scale, as we started to try and be productive, dare I say, with how we were doing deep dive, we ended up in a mode where it was like I'd be doing batch filming weeks where I'd be filming 15 episodes in a week and wouldn't really have time to read the books of the people who are coming on. And then I would be going off a research doc and it turned into sort of this like conveyor belt of episodes.

Which is fine if the thing that you want to do is grow, if the core thing that you want to do is try and grow a podcast. There are people like Chris Williamson, people like Stephen Bartlett, the director of CEO, where the podcast is the main thing that they do. It's like the only thing that they do. Well, only is a strong word, but it's like their main kind of content output. And so they optimize everything for this sort of conveyor belt of guests and try and optimize everything about the episodes. But for me, Deep Dive was never supposed to be about being a conveyor belt of episodes. It was meant to be to host conversations that I would actually genuinely enjoy having.

And therefore, what I've decided to do in my recent kind of change of heart around like growth and productivity and optimization and all that kind of stuff is that we are going to dial down the optimization dial on Deep Dive. So what does that mean? What that means is we might not have an episode happening every week. There are still a bunch of interviews that we've recorded over the last year or so that we're going to be releasing every

And what I want the episodes to be is more opportunistic. Like, let's say I'm in LA and I happen to be hanging out with, I don't know, Jay Shetty or someone. And I just be like, hey, Jay, have you got a few hours? Do you want to just record a podcast? We can just hit record and talk about whatever. And I'd want to be able to do that episode without worrying about like all the production value and all the research and all the title and the

And I often think that there's a lot of really good value shared in those Zoom calls, which no one else would normally get to hear. But I want to, with their permission, of course, open source some of these Zoom calls, some of these like private conversations around growing a business or growing a brand or, yeah, work-life balance or happiness or money or fulfillment, any of that kind of stuff.

I want to kind of open source these conversations and publish those also as episodes of Deep Dive. And really, I want Deep Dive to be a place where I can publish these sorts of conversations. That's what the plan is going to be moving forward. Now, what might be interesting is to look back on

I think a lot of people who listen to this podcast, based on the stats, based on the surveys we've done, you guys, you know, aspire for growth. A lot of you want to be entrepreneurs. You want to have financial freedom. You maybe want to start a side hustle. Maybe you're not like desperate to quit your job, but like, you know, you want to thrive in your nine to five, but you also want something on the side, something that's a bit of a creative outlet, something that might have the potential to make money. I think deep dive is an interesting case study of this because

It's an example of what happens when something starts off as a hobby and then you monetize and optimize it. So at the start of Deep Dive, great interview with Ben Francis, great interview with Shaz who founded Muzzmatch, now known as Muzz, and some great episodes with Dan Priestley and people like that where I was really just asking the questions that I wanted to ask. But then, and so that's kind of what a hobby is. A hobby is a thing that you do for yourself.

I was asking the questions I wanted to ask, interviewing the guests I wanted to interview. And it just so happened that we published those episodes online and people listened in. And that's amazing. But then we thought, you know what? This seems to be going well and people are vibing with it. And why don't we just get feedback from the audience? Why don't we see what the audience wants to hear about? And we listened to the audience. And then the audience was like, okay, well, we want this topic and this topic and this topic. So we found people to interview on this topic, this topic on this topic. The audience, a lot of them were saying that like, a lot of you guys were saying that you don't really like it when I...

you know, for a period of time, I had a lot of like woes, woes and imposter syndrome around writing my book or around like figuring out what I was going to do with my life. And you guys got a bit bored of those sorts of conversations. Cause I guess for me, what, what those conversations were like, and what was perhaps interesting about that is because at that point we switched to batch filming the episodes. It's like on, you know, in that given week,

the thing that I was struggling with personally was the thing that I was bringing up with all the guests. But then those episodes would get sort of released and sort of staggered over time. So it would look like every week for 15 weeks, Ali's talking about the same thing. But in reality, it was just like a few days of recording. And then we thought, okay, well, you know, there's a reasonable point. We're not doing this podcast just for fun because I can just have conversations with people just for fun anyway. We're doing the podcast because we wanted to add value to the audience.

I do apologize. There's some hammering in the background. I happen to have builders in the house right now doing up my mom's bathroom. So we're just going to go for it. And I do beg your pardon. And based on the feedback from you guys, based on the feedback from the audience, we were like, okay, cool. We want to add value. Therefore, let's mold the podcast to what the audience wants from us. Let's make it so that I ask fewer questions about things that I'm personally interested in. Because, you know, as it relates to entrepreneurship and build business and run and stuff, I'm

I am like now quite far ahead of most people who listen to this podcast, just because I've been doing it for a very long time and been obsessing about it for a very long time. And so a lot of the questions that I want to ask are no longer relevant to a complete beginner, for example. And so the podcast started to change and mold based on the feedback we were getting from the audience. And at a certain point, it crossed from it being a fun thing that I do for fun that we just happen to publish to being a thing that I do for the audience that as a side effect, I sort of have fun doing.

And when the enjoyment of it became a side effect rather than the main reason for doing it, that's when it really started to inch into that territory of feeling like a job. Because really the thing, like what is a job? A job is a thing you do for the sake of some kind of external gain. And the happiness you get out of it is like a happy side effect, broadly. Broadly, you can argue with that definition, but it started to feel like a job for whatever that's worth. And at a certain point in business's growth, like indigestion is more likely to kill you than starvation.

So with our business, you know, we've got the YouTube channel, we've got the courses, we've got the book. And then we also had the podcast on top of that. And the podcast was growing and growing. And we're thinking, okay, we want we want to get bigger guests, we wanted to do more things. But it just started to end up it was just taking up too much of my time and too much of my own headspace. And I really sat down to think, you know, if we could only do one or two things and do those one or two things really well, what would those one or two things be?

Um, it would be the main channel for sure. And it would be writing books. And then it would be the courses that fund the business. The podcast was like number four on the, on the priority list. But the problem with number four on the priority list is that as you grow a business, you start to have to make difficult, difficult decisions about deprioritizing certain things that are not like your top one or two or even three priorities. And deep dive always came up as, you know, one of those things that it felt like it was a good idea to try and grow deep, deep dive because it's an asset and it was growing and it's a podcast and it's got longevity and all that stuff.

It seemed like a good idea, but after two and a bit years of doing it, my heart stopped being in it. I think because of the amount of systemization we put into it. I've noticed the same thing with the main YouTube channel as well. The more, you know, I've been doing YouTube for seven years now. And the more, at certain times we've had periods where I have been optimizing a lot of the YouTube channel, optimizing the titles and thumbnails, thinking about the algorithm, thinking about retention, thinking about like engagement stats and how to hack engagement and how to get people to the end and

There is a level of optimization that takes the fun out of the thing. And with the YouTube channel, I've also clawed it back. And in the past, I used to have a few writers who would write videos for me. And now these days, I do most of the writing myself. I try my best to connect to the spirit of service and speak from the heart. And every entrepreneur I've spoken to does have this trade-off at some point. There is this trade-off between doing a thing for the money or doing a thing for the growth or doing a thing for whatever external metric you want and doing a thing that you

resonate with internally. This is why you might know people who have quit high-paying jobs. On the surface, it seems like a bad idea to quit a high-paying job because it's like, oh my god, you're so lucky. How ungrateful you are to be thinking about quitting this. All of these good things are happening. It's got such stability. But you know that your heart's not really in it and this aspect of it that you don't really like and maybe you want to take a pay cut to do something else, to explore your creative outlet or all that woo-woo stuff.

And your parents might not be able to get it. They'd be like, whoa, bruv, what are you doing? You're like, you're like letting go of this like stable thing that's making money. And you're like doing this thing to follow your heart. Like what kind of bullshit is that? But it's that same kind of drama played out with literally everyone I speak to and within our business as well. As you guys may know, I left medicine, which was a, is a very prestigious and stable, stable and somewhat well-paying career path to do this YouTube entrepreneur author thing. That was really weird. Most people at the time were like, whoa, what are you doing? It's kind of weird.

But I think everyone faces that dilemma in our lives. It's not just if you're an entrepreneur or a side hustler or whatever. We all face this dilemma between, do I do the thing that seems sensible because of the externalities associated with it versus do I do the thing that involves following my heart? And in the context of the business, as much as I love interviewing people on Deep Dive, treating it like a job, which is kind of what we started doing, is no longer fun. And I don't want to do it anymore. So I still, coming back to what's the point of this kind of update video podcast episode thing,

I love the fact that we have a podcast. A podcast is freaking sick. I love the fact that I can sit down and have long-form conversations with people I want to have long-form conversations with. I love the fact that if there's a new book coming out, the author of that book is going to be doing the podcast circuit and may well decide to come on Deep Dive. So I get a chance to talk to them. That's really, really, really cool. What I don't love is the upload schedule. What I don't love is batch filming. What I don't love is feeling as if that has to be done to a particular cadence in order to appease the algorithm or because it was a promise we made to the audience.

So what's happening moving forward? What's happening moving forward is that I'm going to continue having these conversations and interviews and stuff, but they might be published on a more infrequent basis. We're probably not going to be doing every week. We've got some stuff in the back catalog that I think you're going to be super excited about.

Some amazing conversations and Zoom calls and stuff like that. Some business coaching sessions that are a bit different from just like a traditional interview. We've got a sick business coaching session that Barb, Angus, and I did with Dan Priestley, who is actually our highest performing podcast guest of all time. That's going to be really cool because you tend not to see the inside of what does a business coaching session look like. I've got Zoom call recordings of sessions I've done with my CEO coach, who's very expensive, or sessions I did with Corey, who's a clinical psychologist, who used to be my executive coach back in the day.

And these conversations are the sorts of things that I think people get a lot of value from, but they don't fit the bill of a traditional podcast, at least in 2024. So those are the sorts of things we want to be publishing. And then, you know, sporadically, opportunistically, when I happen to be in town with someone or having a Zoom call with someone, I might ask their permission to be like, hey, can I just hit record? And if this is useful, we'll just publish it on Deep Dive. So that is what's happening with the podcast. Now, there's a bunch of you who, if you're still watching this little update video podcast episode listing thing,

that you have been following the journey of Deep Dive for maybe weeks, maybe months, maybe even years. You might be part of our Telegram community, which is very fun. You might be commenting on our community posts. You might be commenting on the episodes. You might be one of the various people who send us emails being like, whoa, that episode with Robin Way or Dan Priestley or Eleanor Hunter or whatever changed my life.

Firstly, thank you. Thank you for all your support with this podcast. It's because of you guys listening in and watching and commenting and sharing that this podcast has grown to the point that it has become a job. Because honestly, it's a good problem to have. It's a very first world problem to have. It's like a far bigger problem with the business is where you try something and it doesn't work. But in many ways,

a harder problem or one that sort of involves the heart more than the head is one when is where you're doing something and people do like it and it is working but there's something about it that doesn't doesn't quite feel right so i'd like to say yeah thank you for following the journey so far i hope you'll continue to follow the journey of deep dive because i think some of the episodes we've got coming up are absolutely sick

But without your support, we wouldn't even be in this dilemma. So the fact that we are means I'm enormously grateful because obviously being here and having the privilege to be able to make a decision like winding down or like slowing down rather than like continuing to go for growth and growth and growth on an asset based on my heart rather than my head. That's a very privileged position to be in and a position that most entrepreneurs are not in.

So yeah, I just want to say a massive thank you for that. And I hope you'll continue to engage with the podcast. And I hope you'll actually keep like it's it is it is useful to hear feedback. You know, I was talking at the start about how how based on feedback kind of we changed a change of the format of the podcast. It's still very useful to hear. We can simply choose not to act on it if it doesn't if it doesn't vibe with my heart. But a big part of why I'm here and why I do this stuff is to help people build a life they love and to genuinely try my best to be helpful to you guys. I'm going to continue to have these Zoom calls anyway. I'm going to continue to do the coaching sessions and have these conversations and

But if I know what you guys find helpful, then it helps me realize, oh, you know what? Actually, I'm about to have this conversation. Let's just hit record on the Zoom call. Let's hit record in real life. Let's make sure I've got a nice kind of microphone. I'll take the microphone out of my bag just to have a slightly better audio quality because I know there's a possibility this might be published. So yeah, essentially, I'm going to do all this stuff anyway. But sort of whether or not we publish the episodes does depend on whether or not you guys find them helpful. So if you do or if you don't, then do please let us know. And then we can kind of mold...

figuring out like what we publish versus what we don't publish based on that. Now, over the years of doing this podcast, I have had a bunch of, there've been so many good things. If anyone wants to start a podcast, really would recommend, not necessarily because it's easy to grow a podcast, but because of the friends you make along the way. So for example, one of the ones that most, you know, Ben Francis was episode number one. He's the CEO of Gymshark and the founder of Gymshark.

And he and I became friends through him coming on the podcast. Like he drove all the way from Birmingham or Solihull rather down to Cambridge and came to my flat and we hung out, we got a takeaway and he came with a videographer and he met Angus. And that was just like really fun. It was super cool to be able to meet someone like that who I've looked up to for a very long time. It was super cool meeting Dan Priestley. Dan Priestley's books, you know, I read his books. I highlighted the hell out of them.

I thought he was in Australia because he was Australian, but turns out he lives in London. And so someone connected us on Twitter. Thank you, Dan. And then he came on the podcast. And that episode taught me so much about how to build a business. And it helped me realize that I'd been thinking about business in this entirely weird way. And that episode got like 1.5 million views last time I checked. And now Dan Priestley has become a friend and a mentor. And he helps us out when we're struggling with business stuff. And we just hop on a call with him. And he's done coaching sessions for our team. And everyone loves him. He's a great guy.

And he'd become a friend through the podcast. Then we did an episode two with him and that also got like over a million views because people seem to love Daniel Priestley. That was amazing. It was so good meeting Wilma Caskell, the philosopher, philosophy professor at Oxford who wrote the book, What We Owe the Future. I'd heard of Wil and knew of him on the grapevine for years. And then he came and did the podcast and we had like a four hour long conversation about like philosophy and altruism and philanthropy and all that kind of stuff. And now he's become a friend as well. And that's just really cool.

And similarly, there's a bunch of other people that I've interviewed on the podcast who have taught me a lot of lessons. One of the key lessons that I've really learned from it is that every successful person seemingly has a period of grind and a period of hustle. But then the ones who are happy are the ones who recognize when that period of grind or hustle is no longer serving them. Like to start a business, you kind of have to have that period of grind and hustle. It's very hard to start a business while you have a full-time job.

If you also want to be successful and if you also want to have a really good work-life balance, it's just really, really hard to do that. I don't know many people who've been able to do that. But if you're serious about starting a business or a side hustle or becoming financially independent or any of that kind of stuff, it does take a period of hard work where your life might be imbalanced. But what a lot of these people now advise is it's like strategic imbalance. You recognize that in the season of your life, you're in crunch mode and you're going to grind.

And you're always keeping an eye on making sure you don't get burned out, making sure you are taking appropriate breaks and making sure that you can sort of bring your head above water so that you can survey the landscape and see is continuing to grind still useful right now. I was in a bit of a grind phase when I was working full time and also doing the YouTube channel. And I found ways to make it fun as per the whole like feel good productivity philosophy. This is like the German version, which happens to be on my desk. Well, I found ways to make it fun.

But my work-life balance was not amazing when I was working full-time as a doctor and also commuting an hour to work and back and also trying to have a social life and also trying to go to the gym and also trying to grow a YouTube channel and a business. Honestly, not great work-life balance. I was working all the time. It's just the work was really fun. And I found ways to avoid getting burned out. So if you really, really, really, really value work-life balance, you are probably not going to start a successful business. It's just the way of the world. At least that's what I've gleaned from 100 plus entrepreneurs that I've interviewed on this podcast so far.

But if you want to start a successful business and you're okay with strategically imbalancing your life for a small period of time, then once you get to the other side, once things start to work, you know, it's very hard to get a business working. But once it's working, it becomes a lot easier to sort of take a foot off the gas and to start like optimizing a little bit more for balance. So that's been kind of one of the main takeaways. The other really big takeaway that I took from almost everyone is that, you know, I've interviewed a bunch of people who are like way more financially successful than me or like way more famous than me and or whatever. And

You know, it's what everyone says, like the achievements and the accolades don't actually give you any happiness. Growing and momentum and progress gives you a sense of purpose, gives you a sense of purpose, gives you a sense of like, you know, going forward, you're making progress. It's nice. It's dopamine inducing. But like, you know, the guy running a hundred million dollar business is no happier than the guy running a one million dollar business who is no broadly no happier than the guy doing a 150k a year. Below that point, it starts to make a difference because now like, you know, that's where, you

You know, if you have to worry about paying bills and all this sort of stuff. But, you know, very quickly when you're at least growing a business, you get to the point where money no longer buys more happiness. And actually running a hundred million dollar business is generally a lot more stressful than running a one million dollar business. So, you know, this is something again that Dan Priestley talks about the idea of a lifestyle business. If what you want is freedom, fun, flexibility and decent cash flow, there's no need to try and grow big beyond like try and grow big at all costs.

There's this whole Silicon Valley mentality that's often in a lot of these entrepreneurship podcasts around growth at all costs. But I think, again, it's all about strategy. It's about knowing what the goal is, what's the plan, and what's the system to get there, the GPS framework.

It's about recognizing, you know, at what point does the growth continue to serve you? And at what point does continuing to try and grow at all costs, at what point does that stop serving you? And recognizing when you need to take a step back in that sense, which is in various ways what I'm doing with this podcast now. This episode of Deep Dive is very kindly sponsored by Snipped. Now, Snipped is an amazing app that's absolutely going to revolutionize the way you listen to podcasts.

I've been using it for the last two months and it's become my absolute favorite way to listen to podcasts. Because the cool thing about Snipped is that it's not just a podcast player. What it does is allow you to create snips of each podcast that you listen to, where if you hear something that particularly vibes with you, you can press the snip button or simply tap your headphones. And then it's like this ridiculously fancy AI transcription type feature that will listen to the last like minute of the podcast. It will figure out what's being said and it will create a little snippet or a little snip.

where it will summarize and it will give you like the notes from exactly what was said. And then you can click edit on it and you can like set the start point and the end point. It's basically like being able to highlight a podcast as if you were reading a book. Now, this is really helpful if you want to remember the kinds of things that you hear in podcasts. And it's also really helpful if like me, you are some sort of content creator and you benefit from sharing your insights with other people, which even if you're not a content creator, it's just a nice thing to do generally. And the other cool thing about the snips feature is that you can see where other people have snipped a particular podcast.

And so, you know, we all have way too many podcasts to listen to these days, but you can browse through and you can see, ooh, that episode of Deep Dive was snipped 4,000 times and that one was only snipped 2,000 times. So you know what? Let me prioritize listening to the one with 4,000 snips because more people have highlighted it. And then you can even browse through the highlights. So if you haven't got time to listen to the whole podcast,

you can go through the various snips and you can decide, is this podcast worth you listening to? And because it's a powerful AI tool, it also generates transcripts and chapters for basically every podcast, which means even if the podcaster hasn't like created those chapters already, they'll automatically create them using the AI features. And so you can, again, skip around in podcasts to the various bits that might interest you the most. And actually, it turns out that deep dive listeners already love using Snipped because we are actually the fifth most popular podcast on the Snipped platform.

So if you want to give it a go and you want to level up your ability to listen to podcasts and take notes at the same time, then head over to snipped.com forward slash deep dive. That's S-N-I-P-D, S-N-I-P-D, like snip with a D on the end of it. Snipped.com forward slash deep dive. And that link is going to be in the show notes and also in the video description if it's easier for you to click on it.

And if you sign up via that link or that URL in the next month, then you will get a completely free 30-day trial of Snipped. And then you can try it out for the entire 30 days and you can take all these notes and you can see if it vibes with you. So thank you so much, Snipped, for sponsoring this episode. Okay, so so far we've talked about like two, I guess, takeaways in the work domain. You know, a big part of building a life you love is also health and relationships and joy. And I've had the privilege to interview a bunch of people sort of on the health front and also on the relationships front here on the podcast today.

On the health front, honestly, the biggest takeaway I've gotten is find a way to make it easy so that you can be consistent. Something Alex Hormozy said on the pod was something to the effect of, look, if you can just hit the gym regularly for like six months or a year, that's all it takes to make it so that you'll do it forever.

and doing whatever you can to make it easy. Like these days, I do workouts in the morning and I have a personal trainer and just realizing that, oh, most of these entrepreneur type people who are very busy, they make time to work out in the morning because if you do it in the daytime, it's not going to happen. If you do in the evening, that eats into family time. So mornings are actually a really good time to take care of your health. That's something I've started doing thanks to advice I've gotten on the podcast.

On the relationships front as well, you know, we did a great interview with Professors John and Julie Gottman, who do a bunch of, have written a bunch of books about relationships and do research on relationships. And one of the main takeaways for me from that was how kind of the importance of rituals. You know, one thing I do with my girlfriend is, you know, we do regular-ish relationship reviews where we ask each other the same set of 10 questions every time. We've been doing this for years now.

And it's great for improving relationship health and for being a little bit more intentional about this thing that's crucial to everyone's lives, relationships. Yeah, just trying to inject more intentionality into relationships is something that I've really taken away from the podcast because it is kind of weird. Like most people think it's weird to do a relationship review or to have like a regularly scheduled date night where you talk about your finances or something to that effect. But yeah, a lot of these like relationship expert and relationships therapists seem to land on that insight that, hey, there is value in the rituals.

there is value in doing stuff repeatedly that you know is good for you and creating those rituals as a way to remind you to actually do the thing. Okay. So just wrapping this up a little bit. Firstly, a massive thank you to everyone who has listened to this podcast or watched or subscribed or followed or shared. It's because of you that we're in this very privileged position to be able to kind of follow my heart as it relates to the podcast rather than just my head and rather than just the optimization. Secondly, a massive thank you to any of our guests. We've had over a hundred guests on the podcast so far.

They've all been like ridiculously fun conversations and I've learned something from every single one. And I often take notes during the podcast. Then I often re-listen to the episodes back. My mum thinks it's kind of weird that I sort of watch my own videos, but I tend not to watch my own YouTube videos. I tend to listen to back to my podcast episodes because it's like, oh, it sort of feels like I'm back there and I'm learning in real time. That's really cool. So massive thank you to everyone that we've ever had on as a guest and that we'll continue to have on as a guest.

because the podcast is not stopping. It is continuing. It's just going to be a little bit more like loose in terms of the format, at least for the next season. And then we'll review. We're doing this as an experiment and we'll see how it goes. Who knows, maybe six months from now, I'll decide, you know what? Actually, I really miss doing the podcast with regularity. Let's just go back into it. And I might just do that. But I'm considering this next chapter of the podcast, this next season, a bit of an experiment to see how it feels to do

looser content with less of an upload schedule where i mean you know with more of this stuff around publishing zoom calls and publishing coaching sessions because i genuinely think that can add value to people's lives and i think we can do that in a way that continues to be fun for me all righty so that's it for me uh thank you very much for listening i hope you enjoy season eight of the podcast i hope you'll browse the back catalog of amazing episodes that we've got on youtube and on spotify and wherever you get your podcast snipped is my personal favorite way of listening to podcasts for the record

That'll be linked in the show notes in the video description if you want to check it out. But yeah, thank you so much. Thank you for your support so far. And I hope you enjoy the podcast moving forward. Bye.