Osher Günsberg: Lessons learned over 10 years and 500 podcast interviews
This week, Osher Günsberg released the 500th interview episode of his Better Than Yesterday podcast, a monumental milestone by any measure, but just one of many things he did during the week.
For example, on Monday night, he unmasked Shaynna Blaze in front of half a million viewers on The Masked Singer, one of the numerous shiny-floor shows he hosts on network TV.
On Friday, he regaled his podcast audience with a tale of once being kicked out of Silverchair’s dressing room by one of “the Silverchair Dads” – lighter than his usual Friday fare, where Osher tackles topics such as the upcoming referendum, his mental health struggles, and the hopeless inaction of politics around climate change. Sometime during the week he also narrated a surfing mishap on Bondi Rescue, but this may have been a repeat. It must have been, right?
All of this is to say, Osher is a busy man.
So to have hosted a weekly interview podcast for a decade, in which each well-researched episode runs around the ninety-minute mark, on top of a shorter Friday episode, and numerous television commitments, is a testament to how sincerely he believes in what he is doing on Better Than Yesterday.
Günsberg launched the podcast in 2013, while he was living in America.
The first clue he had that podcasting was going to be “truly revolutionary” was when the Adam Carolla Show was dumped by CBS Radio amidst a station format shift. Carolla continued making the show from his house, releasing the downloads online in the nascent podcast format.
Meanwhile, ratings for KLSX, the station that had shifted formats and axed Corrolla’s show, were down, while Carolla’s download numbers were huge.
“He’s like, ‘hang on a second. All the people that listened to me for so long, they’re still listening’,” Günsberg recalls.
“And then he started talking about how he’s built this massive studio out in Burbank, and it’s like, hang on, he’s got a staff of ten. There’s money in this.
“And so that was like the first really big, big clue. That a major legacy broadcaster was moving over to digital streaming only.”
At this point, Günsberg thought he might have missed the boat.
“To be honest, when I started in 2013, I was like, ‘I’m late to this’.
“But I kind of realised one day, the only difference between people who have a podcast and me, is that one day they just started. So I just started.”
Never underestimate the power of a self-imposed deadline.
Günsberg tagged along one night as his buddy, comedian Luke Heggie, did the rounds of the various stand up clubs, trying out new material, spending 35 minutes at each place. Scott Dooley was on one of the lineups, and Osher invited him to be a guest on his podcast. They locked it in for the following Tuesday.
“He didn’t know that I didn’t know how to record it,” he recalls.
“He didn’t know that I didn’t have microphones, I don’t have an audio connection, I didn’t have anything. The podcast didn’t exist.
“But I had three days.
“So I figured out how to record with the software that I had, how I was going to edit it, I figured out how to publish it.
“I got some microphones from the music shop. And then when Dools walked in the door, it was as if it’d always been there.”
Which brings him to his most-offered advice: “Just start. You’ll figure out the problems later.”
Recovery from addiction is a big topic on Better Than Yesterday, with Günsberg’s own recovery providing the entry point into a lot of guest’s own struggles and triumphs.
500 interviews is an amazing feat, especially given the depth of research he explains each conversation takes. There’s something of recovery literature in the way he describes reaching the 500-mark, too, with its one day at a time edict.
“It’s about just trying to do the very best that I can do, with every show,” he explains.
“And then that’s it. Publish it: move on to the next one.
“It’s not like I wanted to get to one-hundred, I want to get to five-hundred, or I want to get this many downloads. I just try to focus on making it as good as I can.
“Then you turn around – here we are ten years later – and go, ‘Oh, that’s five-hundred interviews, of the best interview I could have done at the time. Holy moly! It’s quite a body of work.
“But I didn’t do it in the ten-year chunk. And I certainly didn’t do it in a five-hundred-episode chunk. I just did it one at a time. And I really enjoy the process. I get a lot out of the process. And I’m really grateful for it.”
As an early adopter of the format, Günsberg found he had to “educate the market, essentially” about what exactly it was he was doing with Better Than Yesterday. He has operated independently since 2013 – “At this point, I don’t see any reason to not be” – and has watched podcasting explode over the last decade.
“It’s extraordinary watching how much the humungo media companies have pivoted. And it’s interesting, I think there’s more pie than there is pie chart, you know? There truly is.
“So, if Mia Freedman gets someone who has no idea that they have this app on their phone to open that app, and start finding content that is so outside of what the main broadcast channels of the world offer, and they are finding content that really speaks to them, that’s great. Because my podcast, and other people’s podcasts, are a few clicks away from that. And that’s fantastic.”
Günsberg reasons that, depending on how you view life, it is either the most terrifying time to be in broadcasting, or the most exciting. Not surprisingly, he lands on the side of excitement, pointing out that his entire career has involved the early adoption of technology.
“Going back to Channel [V], we were doing SMS polling, like, five years before anyone was touching it,” he recalls.
“We were putting IRC chats live to air, before Twitch was ever thought of. We’ve always done that, and I’ve always been into that sort of thing.”
Currently he is tinkering with the visual side of podcasting, “doing interesting experiments with virtual sets” and other innovations he calls “extraordinarily exciting.”
Although he remains independent, he isn’t alone in this enterprise, with Acast involved in the monetisation of the podcast.
“I get so much support from the team at Acast, honestly, they’re just so cool. They are a really interesting player in the field. I’ve been with a number of podcast publishers, but Acast are just really fantastic.
“There’s a really cool sales team that makes sure that the [advertisement] integration is really important, and that the integration really fits. I’ve done a lot of “crowbar” live reads in my time, boy, oh, boy, I can tell you that,” he laughs.
Thankfully, the Acast team matches Günsberg with suitable advertising partners, avoiding such crowbar reads.
“To have a sales team that understand that the real value they are bringing to their client is a podcaster like myself really being authentic around their product – that is fantastic. It gives that client something they’re not going to get anywhere else in the market. And I think that’s really exciting.
“I mean, I’d have waaaay more money if I said yes, to waaaay more industries,” he laughs.
“But, the people who listen to my show, they listen for a reason, and they certainly don’t want to hear me do a live read for a massive diesel company. Because it doesn’t align with me having, you know, Clara Walker, one the most extraordinary climate communicators in the country, on the podcast. It doesn’t make sense.”
Plenty of alignments do make sense, however. Günsberg mentions a sponsored podcast Acast set up with the head of design at IKEA, which, in turn, was recorded live at the Museum of Contemporary Art.
“It’s the ability to have a client integration that really makes sense, and really gives value to, not only the client, but also the listener.
“I think the listeners really appreciate it; they understand that podcasts need to make money.
“And if it makes sense with the client, and the content is authentic, and the content aligns, then it’s a perfect fit.
“And I love that about Acast. They didn’t try to push anything that didn’t work – because it doesn’t serve the audience, or me, or the client.”
Advertising aside, the long form aspect of podcasting is a revelation in itself, and allows for more authentic connections with the audience. As Günsberg puts it: “Life does not occur in sound bites.”
“I think people really enjoy the opportunity to allow the space to breathe, for that kind of conversation to unfold. You and I do not perceive complicated concepts by hearing ten words. Sometimes it takes half an hour, forty-five minutes to get your head around something.
“And that’s the joy that a podcast can bring, which is really beautiful.”
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Nathan Jolly is the Deputy Editor of Mumbrella. He joined the team in July, 2023.
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