Timestamps

00:00:00: Introduction
00:01:38: Dead Honest
00:03:13: How Georgie started
00:05:13: Behind-the-scenes guests
00:07:42: Surprising paths of conversation
00:09:43: Podcasting in middle age
00:15:17: The listeners are the judges
00:17:36: Define your style and stay true to yourself
00:21:15: Georgie’s pivotal conversations
00:25:22: Final thoughts

Interview Transcription

Wendy Harris: You’re listening to Making Conversations Count with me, Wendy Harris, expert telemarketing trainer.  Today’s guest is the deliciously humble Georgie Vestey, and her show is called Dead Honest.  Today, we’re going to be Making Conversations About Honesty Count.

What’s new Wendy Woo.  Getting social on all of those lovely platforms like Instagram and Facebook and Twitter, it’s been great to see our follower count go up.  That means that our listener count’s going up too and you’re coming back because you’re enjoying what you’re hearing.  That’s brilliant news for us and of course we’re fast approaching 2022 and I’ve got some really exciting guests for you.

Over on Podchaser we had a notification from a listener about the Brad Sugars episode.  ohmynoshberkshire had this to say, “Found this episode really insightful.  I even took notes.  Learn before you earn, thank you, big happy, smiley-face emoji and four stars”.  Thank you so much for your kind words and there’s definitely lots and lots of gems in there for listeners to take notes.  Thank you so much for getting in touch.

Georgie Vestey: “That’s somebody’s loved one, so we always treat them as such”.  I’m Georgie Vestey and this is Dead Honest, a podcast where we talk honestly about death.  Now, if there is one death profession, I have always been very curious about, it’s police divers.  I’ve never understood what would motivate someone to climb into freezing black water to recover the bodies of strangers.

Wendy Harris: Today we’re going to be Dead Honest.  We’re going to be dead honest about podcasting from a different point of view, two podcast hosts that have been making conversations count about all sorts of topics, but today the Dead Honest conversation is going to be with winner of the Interview Podcast of the Year at the British Podcast Awards, it’s so lovely to have you here, it’s Georgie Vestey.

Georgie Vestey:  Thank you very much indeed, Wendy, for having me here.

Wendy Harris: Now, we’ve spoken before, so we must sort of just give people a heads-up that we have quite a lot that we agreed about when it comes to podcasting and conversations and all of the stuff that goes on behind the scenes.  We’ve just had a little moment, haven’t we, that we’ve shared on tech.  It’s not just about hitting record and having a conversation and just sending it out there to the big wide world, so we’re going to be making conversations about honesty in podcasting count today.  What got you into podcasting in the first place, Georgie?

Georgie Vestey:  It was really what took me into audio, and podcasting became an extension of that.  I used to do some volunteer work for a coroner in Australia and I was very fortunate to work with a colleague called John Merrick, who was their sort of lead counsellor who liaised with the families, and I was in his office working as an assistant to him, in a sense.  I heard him have a conversation one day, it was very warm and very conversational and quite unlike the sort of conversations we tended to have in the coroner’s office.  I thought, “It must be a friend of his who’s called in”.

I remember asking him after he got off the phone and there’d been lots of laughter.  I said, “That sounded like someone who was quite a lot of fun”, and he told me the story of who it was.  It was actually the mother of a little girl who’d been murdered, and he shared how they had come together over the death of her daughter, and a relationship that at first had been very unsatisfactory, because he didn’t really understand where the parents were coming from emotionally.  He had a lot of truth of vulnerability about how he described that relationship and its evolution and how it had turned into this incredible relationship, where there was this great laughter going on in the middle of a coroner’s office between a bereaved mother and a counsellor.

It made me think, “Gosh, he’s so interesting”.  Just him retelling the story of this little girl’s death, how he approached the parents, how he felt he hadn’t succeeded at first and yet continued to persevere and create not only just a great relationship with them, but also a whole organisation to support parents like that.  I thought, “This is a story that never gets told, the behind-the-scenes stories”.  So that’s what really started my interest in thinking, “Someone should be telling these stories, or at least sharing these stories”.

So, Dead Honest for me is a platform to share the stories of people who basically work behind the front lines of death, so not the paramedics or the doctors or the nurses so much, the people we don’t see, and the people doing the work I say that we hope someone else is doing.

Wendy Harris: I did take a little peek to see the sort of guests that you had on, and to me I was fascinated, because you’ve got divers that are investigators that never really get the limelight of the intricate work that they do.  Yet we all love to watch a crime show don’t we, and we’ll see them on a boat with the gear on, and yet they’re just in the far distance.  Yet they have to tell the story for the people that we see on screen that are the stars of the show, to be able to solve that crime and investigate that story.  It was a really, really interesting take on that part of our life that’s not told.

Georgie Vestey: It’s not told, and I think one of the reasons it’s not told is because is the sort of people who go into those professions, who are behind the scenes, are by definition often not seeking the limelight and they’re very humble.  And the thing that I found really interesting, having interviewed so many different types of death professionals from death doulas to funeral directors, coroner’s officers, as you said police divers, family liaison officers, they have an incredibly high level of job satisfaction.  You think that’s quite weird, because it would look like a very depressing profession to be part of, but actually they’re genuinely driven by the desire to help people.

The fact that they help them at the darkest time of their lives is what makes them so extraordinary to me, and why I think they are so deserving of a platform to have that.  And that’s all Dead Honest is, it’s just a platform to share those stories.  I don’t bring anything to it, except I hope I bring a sort of curiosity and the trust that if you are listening to it, you know that I’m going to take you into a pretty dark space, but it is never going to be voyeuristic.  I am going to ask the questions that are probably a little bit confronting, but which you probably also wanted to hear.  I think sometimes you’re taken in, and I am sure you find this too, Wendy, you can ask a really innocuous question and it just takes you down a path that you just don’t expect.

One of the episodes I remember being struck by, when I was asking this chap in Episode 5, Mo Oliver, who is a fabulous guy, he’s a disaster victim identification person and he had to go to the Tsunami in Sri Lanka to help recover the bodies of British nationals who had died there.  I remember saying to him, “What were your impressions when you first got to Sri Lanka on that day?”  

Yes, he talked about leaving the airport and the massive devastation around the coast and what he was seeing, but the thing that really stuck with him was, because the infrastructure had been completely blown apart on the coast of Sri Lanka, he had to stop at one point and he needed to go to the loo.  Understandably, it was a very long drive and he jumped out of the vehicle, went around the back of this sort of rubble and was going to the loo.  This man came out and he said, “What are you doing?”  He said, “Don’t you understand, my family are buried underneath that rubble”.

It’s those very small moments that you don’t think are going to hit you that hit you, so I think that’s also been interesting for me to share a space with those people, where they get to talk about that as well.  It’s been a hugely rewarding experience to do it.

When I ask you which of the cases that have stayed with you, that when you leave this job you will go back and think, “That one will always be with me”, would you describe a case for me?

“I’m probably known in the office as being quite in control of my emotions, so I can only recall one job where I actually went home and sobbed.  That was when I dealt with a friend’s wife, but I had no idea at the time when I attended the scene.  It was quite a horrific taking of her own life, to the point where she was unidentifiable, viewable”.

Wendy Harris: It’s the fulfilment that you get, isn’t it, from having a conversation that you’ve got a rough idea; you’ve got a format, I’ve got a format.  I like to talk about what it is that you’re doing in your expert field as a guest, then that conversation that counts, I never know what that is, and I never know where that’s going to take me.  We’ve covered subjects like cot death, murder, talking to strangers at the bus stop that then become your best customer. 

You can’t make that kind of thing up, and you never know what’s going to come next, but it is, it’s that’s space for us to be able to share those stories, where others can go, “Do you know what, that happened to me.  Something like that happened to me, I get it”.  I think that’s what makes for really rewarding listening as well, isn’t it?

Georgie Vestey:  Yeah, I agree with you.  It’s one of those things that’s incredibly misleading about winning that award, is that I am so technologically incompetent that when you listen to the finished product, you would be very misled into thinking that I am very professional.  I think it’s one of the things I think that’s wonderful about getting older and podcasting in middle age, is that we can be very transparent about our vulnerabilities.  And in that, we can be encouraging of other people who also feel they might want to get into the field and think, “Oh gosh, I’m never going to sound like that”.  Trust me, I don’t sound like that.  A lot of work goes into sounding like I sound!

I think that’s also one of the joys of doing the sort of work that we do, both of us, is that actually I don’t think I could do this if I was any younger.  I wouldn’t have the experience, I wouldn’t have the perspective, I wouldn’t have the confidence to be as vulnerable with the conversations that I am.  I think the biggest challenge I find as a podcaster in my middle age is, I’m used to being quite competent in the other parts of my life and I thought, “I shall take on podcasting”.  I have been so confounded by how challenging — difficult, not even challenging, difficult I have found the process and how impatient I am with my own ineptitude.  I have showed so little kindness to myself, and frankly I always say I would have fired myself had there been anyone else who could have taken over my role.

Wendy Harris: I’m really trying hard not to laugh so loudly, because I know exactly what it is that you’re saying there!  I’ve been picking up the phone for over 30 years, having conversations with board level, not giving any kind of thought to the seniority of whoever it is.  I am just talking to people, we’re just connecting, we’re having a conversation, we’re looking to get stuff done.  I thought it was going to be such an easy transition to just have a conversation on Zoom and record it.

The learning that has gone into it; spoiler alert, Dr Ivan Misner was my best guest, I had to rerecord it.  Even though it said it was recording, it failed, and he just said, “Don’t feel bad that’s so funny.  It happened to me on Fox News!”  The learning that goes in.

Georgie Vestey: The learning, it is that and I think we become a bit impatient in middle age, with whatever it is that we’re doing, whatever profession we’re in.  People say to me, “What’s your proudest thing about Dead Honest?”  I say, “The fact that I actually did it”, because I’m known as a procrastinating perfectionist, which is this really unfortunate affliction.  That wonderful Nike ad, “Just do it”.  If I could just do it, I would but I can’t because I have to look at it at a 360-degree angle, I have to put it through my analytical processing 25 times, and then I might be able to do it.

It’s not funny when it’s happening to you, but it is that thing of you just — I have a file on my desktop which is for a parallel podcast called Epic Fail, because I have literally every single interview, I have done I have screwed up, excuse the expression, but I have screwed up one element of it.  Like you, the classic where you’ve got the sound, you’ve done this, you’ve got the batteries, you’ve checked the mic, you’ve done all of that.  Finally, you sit down there, and you have a really great interview and then you go look down to press stop and you never pressed record.

You just sit there slapping the side of your head, “Nobody should have let me out with a recorder.  Whose stupid idea was this anyway?”  There’s a challenge when we take on new things in midlife, particularly if we do come from places where we feel we have been quite competent.  It can stop us because we just get impatient with ourselves and think, “Well, obviously I can’t do this”.  I think that’s the thing that I’m proudest of with Dead Honest in a way, is I actually kept going and that was important.

Wendy Harris: It’s been going for a number of years, hasn’t it, Georgie?

Georgie Vestey: No need to rub it in how long it took me to get here, thanks, Wendy!  We do joke that actually climate change will be solved before I actually produce my next series.  But yes, it has, and I think it’s also I do other stuff as well, so it’s not something I can give all of my time to, nor do I think it’s something, and I don’t know if you find this, that actually when I’m doing a creative project, I find it helps to have something else to do, to have in parallel, so that I can rest my brain a bit and come back to it fresh.

I find I’m often my least productive when I devote myself to something full on, be that motherhood, creative task, job or whatever.  I have to strike that balance between different things to take myself off and refresh myself.

Wendy Harris: For me I find podcasting highly addictive, the conversations and what comes out of it.  But the other side to the technological challenges and the learning that you have to do and the support that you have to call upon, thank you Neal, is the expectations of the episode.  In my mind, sometimes I’ll go, “Do you know that was just a fantastic interview and I loved it and everybody’s going to love it too” and then they don’t.  Then the episode that you go, “Well, yeah, no that was okay.  That was interesting, it’s still got value.  I’m going to roll with it anyway”, and people love it, and it surprises you.  I think it’s that kind of grounding that we’re not the judge of what’s good or great, the listeners are.

Georgie Vestey:  That’s so true.  In some episodes, as you say, I’ve been absolutely — I think they’re fantastic episodes because they’ve spoken to something within me, but they may not have dealt or spoken to something more widely.  As you say, we just can’t make that judgement ahead of time, we just can put it out there and hope that it finds an audience. 

I think that’s one of the reasons why I love podcasting over conventional audio, is I can ask questions which I wouldn’t be allowed to on the radio, I can be more explicit, more graphic; but also, I can reach people across — I mean, nothing is more exciting than looking at the fact that you’ve got listeners in Africa, or suddenly it’s gone big in Canada.  That’s what I love, it’s like reaching your tribe, which for me is a very important part of why I do this.

I love that side of podcasting and I also love the fact that we’re independent.  I don’t know about you, I imagine we’re quite autonomous beings, we don’t like being bossed around and told what we can do.

Wendy Harris: Definitely not.

Georgie Vestey: It gets worse as you get older, I hate to tell you, but equally that’s quite liberating because it is relatively low budget tech-wise, so pretty much anyone — it’s very democratic in that sense, which I love.  It also allows me to do it in the way that I would like to do it.  I wouldn’t be bothered to do it if I was being told in a different way.  I don’t know how you’d feel with your podcast, but that feels quite strongly to me, I feel quite strong about that.

Wendy Harris: Confession, it’s only recently that I’ve started to listen to other podcasts.  It was maybe Episode 30-something before I thought, “I wonder how they do it?”  On reflection, whilst it was a shock to quite a few people, especially my producer said, “You know so-and-so’s podcast?” and I was like, “Hmm, I’ve heard of it, not listened to it”.  It was because for me, I wanted to create my show.  This is how I want it to be. 

If I start listening to lots of other formats, and styles, my own style and format would just be chopping and changing, chopping and changing because I’d be trying to get back to who I am.  So I decided that I was going to get into an absolute rhythm of what I wanted it to be before I could allow myself to go and listen and be a listener and not be judging as a show.

Georgie Vestey:  I think what’s wonderful about that is the fact that it’s about authenticity and I think as podcasting has become so incredibly crowded as a market, I find it harder and harder to find things to listen to.  What I’m always interested in listening to are people like us, what I call the boutique back-street podcasts, where you can feel the person who makes it in the voice of the person speaking and also in the choice of mannerisms that they have, you come to learn and like about them. 

I think that is one of the things that’s the key to a successful podcast now, particularly as independent producers if you’ve not got a big backer, like Spotify or Audible or whatever, is keep to yourself.  I think that’s really important, because your uniqueness is probably the only thing that is going to punch through at any level.  There are over two million podcasts now.

That’s why I think it’s really important when we do these sort of podcasting courses and whatever is that people don’t lose sight of what they themselves bring, because guaranteed that’s actually what your audience are looking for as well.  There’s no point in me starting to sound like a Radio 4 presenter or whatever, and it’s very easy to start doing that, because we’re brought up with those voices in our head and the way of presenting and whatever.  You have to exorcise that and keep very true, I think, to who you are and that’s true for any creative endeavour or indeed any business endeavour that you feel you author that is your own.  It’s got to stay very grounded in who you are and what you then bring into the market.

Wendy Harris: That’s what listeners are looking for isn’t it, it’s that ability to tune into what is being foretold.

Georgie Vestey: Yeah, and I think people are really interested to hear vulnerability and maybe that’s a post-COVID thing and whatever.  But I think when podcasts are relatable, you know, you can hear sometimes when I ask a question, I’m nervous because I’m actually possibly straying over a line which might get a snap back.  I think that’s what takes your listeners with you is when they hear your openness to being vulnerable and relatable; that’s what draws them in.  It’s not about the downloads, it’s the quality of the audience that you’ve got, not the quantity of the audience that you’ve got, at least it is for me.

Wendy Harris: Yes.

Georgie Vestey: Probably because I don’t have a very big audience!  But that’s much more relevant and important to me because those relationships, the authentic relationships are important to me.

Wendy Harris: With the relationship with listeners, it kind of brings us onto that point of the conversation that counted for you really in terms of the pivotal moment.  What was it that happened to you, Georgie, that you’ve not told me about already?

Georgie Vestey:  I think it was bearing witness, in a sense, being in a position where I’ve been very privileged to work inside coroner’s officers, so I’ve been very privileged to seeing people where there’s no [bleep].  On the worst day of your life, you are who you are, and I think seeing John and hearing John talk about his own vulnerability in approaching that relationship and exposing his, I hate that word “journey”, but his journey from being a not terribly effective person to becoming a really valued person.  It was part of that story that also interested me, exposing his own vulnerability, and I’ve heard some really extraordinary stories from people where they’ve been incredibly generous to open up to that.

Now, why does that speak in particular to me?  I’m not entirely sure.  But I do tend to find the other organisations I work with, one is supporting families whose relatives have been murdered abroad and another organisation that supports the greater scrutiny of stillbirth investigations by coroners, there is something that meets my need to be in an authentic place when I’m actually emotionally in an authentic place with those people.

The thing that really doesn’t work for me is being in a wildly social situation where I can’t actually have what I would call a proper conversation.  Most people would probably think, “Oh my God, she sounds so intense”, but actually that’s where I function at my best.  I like myself best at that level and I like meeting people at that level.  So, I think that’s what sort of drew me into that and just thinking, “Actually, I don’t think I’m alone on this one”.  Fortunately, it’s proved that I’m not, other people are generally drawn into that as well.

Wendy Harris: It’s the taking it back to what we wanted to talk about today in terms of making those conversations about honesty count, isn’t it?  There is no room to be anything but honest.  You don’t have the time to disguise.  The masks are thrown away, aren’t they, if anything, because you can only bear so much in those situations, so I think you really connect with true self.

Georgie Vestey: I do, and I think also having — I did a blog on my website about being brought up in the country as a kid, because people often say to me, “How did you get so comfortable with death?”  I think there’s something about a country childhood where you are exposed.  I was brought up in Australia and where you are exposed to pretty basic life and death every day, whether it’s things flooding, and you end up walking down a riverbank and seeing a cow strung up in a tree or there’s a dead kangaroo on the way into school which your mum has to drag off the road.  You’re much more confronted with life and death.

I didn’t feel a repulsion around that.  It was quite a normalised thing I was brought up with.  It’s one of those things that it can either make people run a million miles.  It’s always that terrible thing, people say, “You have a podcast, how lovely.  What’s your podcast about?”  I’m like, “It’s about the people who help us when we die and when we’re dead”.  And it’s like, “Oh”.

I have to apologise, I can’t make it sound any better than that, I’m really sorry because that’s what it’s about.  It actually is quite a good way of filtering.  It’s self-selective.  The people who want to hear it generally are my sort of people and we can have a great connection because of it.

Wendy Harris: It is really interesting, and it’s hit up on my playlist for those moments when I will go, “I’m going to listen today and be a listener”.  Georgie I really, really thoroughly enjoy your honesty about podcasting and your show, and I think for anybody that’s thinking about podcasting, or that is podcasting and is wondering why they’re podcasting, just remember why you started it, why you want to start it in the first place.

Georgie Vestey: That is such good advice, Wendy.  Funnily enough, I was doing a talk this weekend for the Podcasting Festival, and I think there are two things that people really need to ask themselves.  Podcasting is really hard; it looks easy to do, but actually to sustain it is really hard or I certainly found it hard.  I find it hard to keep it going in terms of ideas and delivery and all the rest of it.

The other thing I think that’s really important and has helped me hugely to deliver Dead Honest at the level that it is, is I have this fantastic friend who is also a podcaster.  We talk about mentors and often mentors we think have to be much bigger than us, but actually I think the most useful mentors are people who are just maybe one step ahead of you and who have got the time and the compassion to believe in you when you don’t believe in yourself.

I know for me personally, I have another podcast friend called Natasha Miller, and between us we meet online every week on a Thursday, and we support each other.  We listen to each other’s work and when we’re feeling really rubbish and like the whole world’s crap and what we are doing, we should throw our recorders out the window, the other person will pick up and support you.  So, I’m a big advocate of what I call micro mentors, particularly as an independent, using them to help you deliver on the process.

Wendy Harris: Support and grow; really important.

Georgie Vestey: Very important indeed.

Wendy Harris: If you have somebody or you have a story that you’d like to share, do get in touch with me and the team here at Making Conversations Count.  We love to give a shout out to everybody.  But let’s carry on the conversation next week, where we’re going to be getting savvy with a dynamic duo that are AA-rated; we’ve got Anna and Anita of Get Savvy joining us next week.