September 01, 2025

Live podcast events are “surreal” says Alastair Campbell

4 minutes

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Alastair Campbell, former UK government communications and strategy director and now host of The Rest Is Politics, found it “absolutely surreal” to be performing a podcast on stage at a sell-out O2 Arena. “We had something like 15,000 people there,” he said. “It was very, very odd.”

Campbell revealed this while being interviewed by Count Binface, a man with a garbage bin on his head who has stood three times for election as a British Member of Parliament despite being from the planet Sigma IX. (Don’t worry: this is quite a normal thing for UK politics.)

“I went on one of the biggest podcasts in the world”, says one author, “and it didn’t sell any books.” Amie McNee went on Jay Shetty’s show - and adds that she is developing a theory that “Artists have been taught that success comes from external forces,” she says, before adding that success doesn’t come that way: it comes from word of mouth. Her book, by the way, is called We Need Your Art. Stop Messing About And Make Something..

Talks.co, a platform connecting podcasters and guests, has launched free speaker pages to help hosts find guests. The page comes with an easy-to-use URL to help promote it.

> > > Read more of today’s podcast industry news stories on the Podnews website: and get our free daily newsletter.

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