Happy (13th) Birthday to Minter Dialogue!

A lucky day!

Today, November 25th, marks the exact 13th birthday of my English podcast, Minter Dialogue. Truth be told, though, my English podcast is actually a tad younger than my French one. I began my French language podcast five months earlier (July 30th) with a first interview of Vincent Ducrey, then the internet advisor to the French minister, Luc Chatel. If my French podcast continues to bubble along at a rhythm of 1 episode per month (for a total of nearly 150 episodes), my English podcast is now approaching 550 episodes and continues at a pace of one episode per week (except holidays and illness). But what constitutes a long-running podcast? What deserves the title of “long running” in podcasts? The vast majority of search results in Google will bring you podcasts that are great to listen to while running long distances. But, what about podcast endurance? This Podsauce article took 5 years as a base standard for “long-running.” What if your show lasted five years, but only produced a show or two per year? Does consistency have any merit? Or should it only be about the number of downloads and listens? My shows may not win any popularity contest, but I’m proud of the longevity and the variety of fascinating guests. In the end of the day, the thing that keeps me going is the level of conversation I end up having during (and sometimes directly after) the recording. As Emma Vaughan, Global head of advertising business at Spotify, said in the 2023 Podcasting trends report:

“Today, podcasts are a key driver of social and cultural conversations. They extend cultural discussions, start new ones, and provide connection in a world where people are seeking an alternative to headline-skimming and surface-level social media posting.”

Podcasting has come a looooong way, to be sure. According to ListenNotes, as of today, “There are at least 3,227,355 podcasts* and 181,935,074 episodes in the world.” For comparison purposes, they note that “IMDB has over 8.3 million titles (movies, TV shows, TV episodes), Spotify has over 70 million tracks, and Audible has over 470,000 audiobooks.” According to the Spotify report, meanwhile, the peak demographic is clearly 55-64 year olds… so, that definitely includes me.

In any event, before giving you my top 13 most listened-to episodes of my show, I want give a hat tip of admiration for the following inspiring bastions of the podcast world who began before me and are still going strong, including:

• Mitch Joel (also a friend): Six Pixels of Separation
• Marketing over Coffee by John Wall and Sean Penn
• The Duct Tape Marketing podcst with John Jantsch
• Marc Maron WTF
• The Joe Rogan Experience

In this short list, I don’t include those who switched from radio and mainstream media… although you might consider Marc Maron a product of MSM.

Top 13 episodes over 13 years on the Minter Dialogue

Over the 13 years, so far I have published exactly 546 episodes. I’ve definitely tried to have a diversity of guests, including some lesser-well-known voices. The topics have ranged from astrophysics, to World War Two, to leadership, to spirituality and mental health, passing through any number of slants on business, entrepreneurship, leadership, marketing and technology. I’ve had individuals from both — so-to-speak “extreme” — sides of the political spectrum. I’ve had guests from over 60 countries. The youngest guest was the 19-year-old Rishi Sharma (MDE218), “Capturing The Stories of All the Heroes of the Second World War,” that also happened to be one of the highest rated shows. In a case of serendipity, as I was researching for this post, I saw that Rishi Sharma just signed a deal with Dan Snow’s History Hit and Little Dot Studios! The oldest guests, meanwhile, include the astrophysicist, Dr. Mike Hauser, 82, (MDE502) and my father, Victor Dial, 84 (a special one for MDE500). If you’d like to have a taste for my show, you can check out the highlight reel here.

Meanwhile, here is a list of the top 13 episodes ever listened to on my show, which is compiled using the data from my old podcast host (Buzzsprout), my new host (Megaphone) and the listens via Youtube:

1. The Importance of Design and Brand in Business Building with Marty Neumeier (MDE314)
2. The Power of Letting Go with John Purkiss, aka Banahasta (MDE474)
3. Insights of a Great Negotiator with Chris Voss, best-selling author and CEO of the Black Swan Group (MDE322)
4. A New Way to Think with Author and Professor Emeritus Roger L Martin (MDE470)
5. Sleep With Me! Life Lessons and the Podcast Founder Story with Drew Ackerman (MDE368)
6. Jan Thompson, filmmaker, “Never the Same” and “The Tragedy of Bataan” (MDE56)
7. Let’s Scramble with an Agile Strategy! Marty Neumeier on Writing a Business Thriller (MDE302)
8. CEO Excellence with Carolyn Dewar, author and Senior Partner at McKinsey (MDE471)
9. How to be a Great Leader and Build Trust with INSEAD Professor Gianpiero Petriglieri (MDE310)
10. Delphine Mousseau, localization strategy for Zalando eCommerce (MDE159)
11. The Non-Obvious Trends for 2019 with Rohit Bhargava (MDE315)
12. Insights from Nick Wheeler, Owner & Chairman of Charles Tyrwhitt (MDE177)
13. How to Boost Your Empathy Factor at Work with author, Marie Miyashiro (MDE296)

Of note, both of the shows I did with Marty Neumeier feature in this list (at #1 and #7), a testament to the draw of Marty. Other than that duo, it’s a representative mix I’d say of my guests. For anyone who’s new to my show, you could do worse than start with this top 13 hit parade!

I want to thank my guests for being willing, my subscribers for loyally (if most quietly) listening, my family for the constant support. You can of course subscribe to the show on basically every well-known podcasting service here.

* From ListenNotes, they qualified the number in the following manner: “Other websites / apps may claim that they have way more than 3,227,355 podcasts in their database. This is because they inflate the number by including A LOT of 1) podcasts that were already deleted long time ago; 2) super low-quality podcasts (e.g., no episodes at all, only one 10-second episode in the RSS feed for testing, or machine-generated audio); 3) non-audio contents distributed via rss (e.g., RSS feeds with only PDF files, not audio). On the other hand, we deploy automatic scripts (24/7) and human moderators (daily) to clean up data. We try our best to minimize the number of such bad “podcasts” in our database.”