Graham Brown So delighted to be speaking to Ian from cold war conversations, a lot of people speak highly of you. Are you surprised, were you pleasantly surprised by how well this has been received by your fans in terms of people supporting you and actually carrying this podcast forward?
Ian Sanders Yes, I am. I mean, certainly, when I started it, I never realized how popular, it would get, I'd expect to probably get a few hundred listeners, maybe an episode or something like that. But it really started to snowball quite quickly, early on. And, as I think you're aware, we hit a million downloads mark a couple of months back, which was I never imagined we would get anywhere near that and we have a loyal band of listeners who support us financially as well.
Graham Brown No, it's fantastic. And the content is great as well. I was listening to one about the Irish lad in Lebanon. And I didn't realize how many Irish served out of there. I mean, it's kind of a bit of an untold story, isn't it?
Ian Sanders Well, that's very much what the podcast is about. Whilst I enjoy interviewing some of the big names and names that people are familiar with. What I love are the unknown stories. The stories that have never been told and would never get told unless I'd ferritin them out or track them down. Those are the stories that I probably enjoy the most. And some of them are just so unexpectedly powerful and moving as well. That's the other thing I didn't expect. And I think it is sort of almost an aspect of audio because you're concentrating on the listening. I think with video and audio, you're slightly distracted by the visual content as well. Whereas with audio on its own, you're hearing every nuance, pause, breath, that level of detail that you probably wouldn't see with video in my view.
Graham Brown It's more human as well. Isn't it? Like you say. You're talking about stories, which aren't necessarily the big celebrities, the unknown human stories and then they're quite emotional sometimes as well, inspiring. And they're heroic in many ways, Aren't they? Even though they don't class themselves as heroic stories, they have all that kind of narrative framework that you expect of the hero myth. Somebody who faces adversity was an outsider. and so on. I wonder what you think. The audience gravitates towards this content. And especially at this time, what is it about history? We're seeing this explosion of history content because let's go back to school and think about history lessons and our history teachers. Why wouldn't they be popular as history is now on the podcast, what was going on? Cause it's the same content, right?
Ian Sanders It is the same content. I think particularly with my subject matter a lot more of it is being dramatized on TV and film. So you've got things like Deutschland 83 and that series, you had the Americans and espionage series as well. You've had movies like Korea’s recently come out with Benedict Cumberbatch, which is a spy espionage movie as well. The 1980s, which is the sort of, one of the main periods that I lived through and where I experienced the cold war has become a very popular period for TV series to cover, and whilst the podcast is called Cold War Conversations. It's not purely the military side. I'm very interested in the social and the civilian experience as well. And, almost as you said, sometimes I approach people and they say, why would anybody be interested in hearing my story? It's very ordinary. It's very boring, but it's the little details that you find in that, that you wouldn't get necessarily in a textbook or a mainstream documentary. And I think that that's the other key thing about podcasting is you can really niche down on a subject that might not have a mainstream interest, but you can build a decent audience around that subject matter.
Graham Brown Is there ever a temptation to not say dumb it down, but go mass with your content that you want to grow this bigger and bigger. How do you sort of refrain from that and keep it focused? Like you say, keeping it niche because people want content and then maybe there's always that temptation as an advertiser or maybe I can, if I cover wider subject areas, I can get more people. How do you keep it really focused?
Ian Sanders By keeping it varied. I mean, that's what I've been really fascinated by is that the subject matter I cover is quite varied. It would be very easy to produce a podcast that purely focused on the military side or on the civilian experience or on espionage, for example. But what I'm finding in the feedback I get from listeners, as they say, look, I came for the spy episode, but I've stayed because I'm fascinated by the other varied content that you've got in there in stories that I never realized that I'm really pleased about that because I do like to try and keep it fresh and not the same old stories each time.
Graham Brown Yeah. My enduring memories of the Cold War, being 17 years old. I remember waking up one, it must've been an evening. And in my parents' home, the family home, lying on the couch and waking up because something was going on in the news and it was November 9 89. So, you know what's coming next and being 17 years old and seeing people, normal people, east German, standing on top of the wall, the wall, not the Berlin Wall, the wall. And it was. For me, it was like, I couldn't believe the scenes that I was seeing. At the time being a teenager as well, like you can easily accept that, okay, that’s how things are done now, but I'd grown up in, it always been this presence, that that's how the world was. And I think we kind of forget, don't we? What the Cold War really was like, there was that impending presence. Always. I remember things like bomb shelters. We don't think about those now, but even back then people talked about them. What I'm trying to get to is that what you're capturing now is stuff that we've easily committed to memory and forgotten about. And what sort of things have you sort of discovered going back in time and talking to these people that were obvious back then, but we don't see now.
Ian Sanders Just the simplicity of life. I think with the Cold War, there is an element of nostalgia for it, for a world that was more straightforward, a world where we knew who our enemies were for our perceived enemies were, and they were those two big geopolitical blocks of, the communist countries or the countries allied to the Soviet Union and then NATO and the Western countries and it was very much almost black and white. It was very clear what those differences were. And I think that there is a nostalgia for that safety, not safety because obviously, that was the ever, shadow presence of nuclear war. But that sort of predictability, I guess, of life there. I think the surprising thing I found is that, and I probably knew this as well, but the similarities of life across the wall or the division between the two blocks, I mean, people still, fell in love, went to school, all of that stuff still went on. You know the differences were around the political influences and that's where it's interesting where you hear, what was it like to be taught Marxism Leninism at school? You thought history was not
Graham Brown Right. Exactly.
Ian Sanders But, fancy digesting, dusk time or something like that. So GCSE
Graham Brown Amazing. Is it, different like the stories, the version of the cold war that you get from the stories compared to what we learned in history, as an example obviously it's a lot more humanized, but do you learn a different facet of it because you've studied this for years anyway, so I'm sure you know better than anybody else, but have you seen a different angle to it?
Ian Sanders I have seen a different angle. I mean, one of my early interviews, and it was one of the ones, I was most nervous about doing because it was a big, a big name.
It was the son of Nikita Khrushchev, who was the Soviet leader at the time of the Cuban missile crisis. So this was Sergei Khrushchev, and he was about 20 years old at the time of the Cuban missile crisis. So he was old enough to know what was going on. And his father was confiding in him what he was having to deal with and what some of the decisions were that he was faced with to some level. And, I found that just, I was talking to somebody who was at the right hand, of a guy who was making decisions that could have ended the world at that time. And some of the insight he gave me, I mean, things I wasn't necessarily aware of because I mean, I've not been to university, so my learnings are from reading and a passion, as you can see for the book collection behind me. Not that I can pretend to have read every one, but he was telling me about, how the US hadn't realized that in Cuba, they'd given the local command of the nuclear weapons to the Soviet commanders in Cuba with instructions that if Cuba was invaded, they could use them. And things like that, what made it even closer to nuclear war. Because there wasn't that overall control that you got later on in the cold war, where the president had to order a nuclear strike. They'd actually given local command. There are other things as well from the civilian experiences as well, that the way that people had to live almost a schizophrenia life, In a country like east Germany. So you'd have a certain facade that you would give to your workmates and other people. And then at home, you would have a completely different life where you could perhaps speak more freely or more openly with your family. But even then with the opening of the Staci files, there are people who discover that their husbands or wives.
We're in a film was for the stars you there, but having to, live that life where you're having to carry those two personas. And I interviewed a guy who was a KGB, a deep-cover agent in the US. And he did, it was essentially living three or four different lives because he was a KGB agent. He'd married a woman in the US who had no idea of his double life. And he also had a wife and family in East Germany who he would periodically go and visit as well. So, he was juggling
Graham Brown What was real life? That was the question.
Ian Sanders I found that really interesting getting into that. How would you deal with that?
Graham Brown Hmm, that's fascinating. Yeah. I wonder as well. I mean, you talking about the stars, he * as well. They were famous for recording everything, weren’t they? Every detail, listening to everything.
Yeah, they do. But it's the banality of that as well, because it's sort of like the subject a, got in his car, drove to the shop, bought two potatoes, had to put in a paper bag or whatever drove back, it's the complete banality of what's in there. I mean, I interviewed a former BBC journalist, who'd had access to his Staci file and he shared with me some of the surveillance photos as well. Where he'd been out walking in the street and they'd obviously got a camera in a bag or something over somebody's shoulder. And they'd, they’d got photos of him. So it was quite pervasive, but not necessarily very efficient in some of the information, certainly some of the information it was gathering. I mean, people have seen films like The Lives of Others.
Graham Brown Yeah, fantastic.
Ian Sanders A trial there. But that level of surveillance was quite rare in terms of, putting bugs in houses and things like that. But the way that they, the *again, were using psychological ways to make people informed. So if they were trying to get information about a group of people, they would approach one of them and say, we need you to give us information about your friends and that person would normally say in the first place, No, I won't do that. Which case the size it would probably then respond with, well, your children might be going to university then and your wife's going to lose her job and various other things going to happen. Are you sure you still want to not tell us what's going on? When I hear those stories, I'd like to think I would have taken the hero status and not bow to that, but I don't know. You've no idea the wall is going to come down and you think that situation is going to continue for the rest of your life. What would you do? Uh, it's not an easy question, but it's a fascinating one, and one of the many things that just keeps me coming back to the Cold War.
Graham Brown Absolutely. You're empathizing with the people of the time and trying to see it from their perspective, like even Khrushchev son, as an example, I don't know what he was like as a person, but I'm certainly thinking he probably wasn't the demonic figure that his father was at the time to the media. That you probably understood a little bit about.
Ian Sanders Yeah. And, and he talked about seeing Stalin on a reviewing stand when he was with his father and one of the great lines that he gave me said, look, my father said to me, if Stalin’s office calls say nothing, say absolutely nothing, because what Chris Jeff was fearful of was that his son would say, oh yeah, he's meeting with so-and-so. And Stalin was always paranoid of coups and plots and things like that, and Stalin would put two and three together and make, whatever. And even at those higher levels in, the Soviet countries, you still had that, that danger of people thinking that you were plotting or you were up to something.
Graham Brown How did it feel to be connected in some form to Stalin? You know, who was very much like a mythical figure, isn't he? That and very fearful? I mean, we all know the stories of Hitler, for example, but I think Stalin is a lot more ominous isn't he, there's less document about him in the media. He's less of a fantastical figure like Hitler in the sense that he's the obvious bad guy, but Stalin seems to be, unless you've studied history, but he was as bad as the baddest guy out there, but you've connected with him through somebody. That must feel very strange, less than that, and especially given that, you started this podcast as a passion project, and now you're talking to these people. How does that feel?
Ian Sanders It does feel very strange. It certainly does. I mean, the beauty of podcasting is that you can approach people that you'd normally have no right to speak to or have any other way of getting into that. And that gives you opportunities, like speaking to the likes of Sergei Chris jobs, speaking to somebody, there was a woman I spoke to who was age 12 and she was lived in Romania. She came back from school and the security *in her house pulling the place apart. And that's the Romanian equivalent that the Staci*. And her father had gone on a protest in Bucharest, a one-man protest against the leaders of communist Romania. And it completely turned her life upside down at that point. For people to share these stories with me, I mean, that's the other thing is I thought, okay, I'm going to hear these stories, I'm going to record them and then I'm going to publish them. But there's a lot of emotion and, a number of people say, you know what? I haven't even told my family. This level of data in this story. And some of these guests come through complete serendipity. I mean, one of the interviews I really love was with a guy who was in the Hungarian uprising in 1956. And I'd been after somebody who'd experienced it and could talk about it in English for quite some time. And it just came by chance on Twitter. I saw a tweet,*. And it was from his daughter saying, this is my dad having his last beer before lockdown. This time, 70 years ago, he was handed a machine gun and was told to store it in the radio station in Budapest. Now to most people, they would think not really sure what that's about but immediately, I knew this guy fought in the Hungarian uprising. So got in contact with her through Twitter. Recorded the interview. And she said to me later, I didn't know hardly any of that. He's talked to me a little bit about it, but you have just illuminated, a whole, a different part of the story and no idea what, what he'd experienced.
Graham Brown How does that happen? Is it a skill that you have, obviously you've got a talent to do that and get that out of people and you're passionate about the subject and they trust you? Is there something special about audio and the podcast that enables that to happen? Or is it, maybe the times we live in when people are more open, have you ever thought about why is it that you can almost get to this sort of therapist level engagement with the people you're talking to.
Ian Sanders I think it's to do, with audio and the intimacy of audio as well. What I find, if I listened back to an episode, you can see the guests warm up as the interview progresses.. They begin to trust you , they begin to know you and they start to share more with you. And it is like a one-to-one conversation. Obviously, I'm very straight with them. This is going to be published. Are you okay with this and all that? That side of things, but because it's a one-to-one conversation and it just, you start to build that element of trust there. One of the areas that I love in an interview is when I hear guests say, oh, yeah, I'd forgotten about that, let me tell you about, bang. Often that's worth the, gold is that at the end of that. I mean I joke when people ask, what do I do? I say I'll just press the record button and ask a few questions, that's all I do. But I think the key is listening. You've got to listen to it, it's very easy to be looking down your list and thinking, right, my next question is this, and not listening to what the interviewee is saying to you, and if you listen, you will hear something that will take you off on a complete tangent, but it may deliver you something you would have never gotten out of that interview. Before that, that being said, I often go back and I'll listen to it and say, damn, why didn't I press a bit more on that. But
Graham Brown It's a rabbit hole. Those are the best parts, these conversations aren't they, that you can really go deep into it. And a lot of people are sort of used to a format, one it's like, okay, I've got to get that, just shut off and let me get through these questions. That's in a way how we've been trained. Isn't it?
Ian Sanders I think the other thing is we're also used to very short soundbites and, oh we've got is the news coming out, we're going to have to cut that interview short *. Whereas with a podcast, it's almost, I don't know whether the term slow radio or it's slow audio, you can expand out and you can have an hour and a half, two hours, even more, if people want it. And so you're not having to, whilst I do edit to mainly to get rid of my stumbles and my um’s and uh’s, you can have that long-form that you wouldn't be able to get certainly in mainstream media.
Graham Brown I'm curious to know what you're like when you're not doing a podcast. I think from my perspective, I really enjoy podcasting and everything you've said is really what I feel about podcasts as well as you can achieve like a real connection with somebody fast. If you listen really intently and you respect what they have to say rather than have to get your point across. That is, I think something that podcasts can do, I've gravitated towards podcasts because, in real life of such a thing, I'm not very, I'm not very articulate in the sort of social spaces. I'm good on stage, my biggest fear is being in a networking event where somebody walks up to you, So Graham, what do you do? That's when I want the hole in the ground to open up and me falling in it. But on this platform, I can speak to anybody. What was it like with you? Are you, how are you off-mic, off-air?
Ian Sanders I think podcasting has helped me become more confident off AIR. I feel that my speaking skills have improved, although after people listen to this, they might disagree.
Graham Brown It’s all good!
Ian Sanders If you say to somebody that, you have a podcast, it does make them stop. They look at you in a different way. And the bit that makes me laugh is, my daughter's school, and, she's obviously mentioned that I have a podcast and her friend's like, oh that's really cool your dad's got a podcast. And she said, well, check out the subject matter before you think.
Graham Brown Well, she should do well in history lessons though surely now.
Ian Sanders Both of my kids aren't that interested in history, much to my immense
Graham Brown That is karma
Ian Sanders But they do understand that the passion that I have and I showed them reviews and I show them, emails like that, and they're quite astonished that there is that level of interest out there, but they’re definitely is. There's a real appetite for history. And obviously, with the niche that I work in, I'm seeing a real appetite for cold war history.
Graham Brown Well, your audience very well as well. I was looking at, I'm just doing my research, looking at different podcasts, using Patreon, it seems that very niche subjects do really well on Patreon. And I was looking at one free sample, went down a rabbit hole with is an American podcast called Dungeons and Daddies. Five guys who live role-play and they do it really well. I mean, one of them's an actor, but they're actually playing it and they produce it really well. And these guys are making $170,000 a month from donations. I was looking at Patreon and the funny thing is you look at a Patreon page, it's very sort of basic, isn't it in design? It's sort of like, design from many years ago. It's not flash. It's very like, this is what it is. I think authentic nature, it's really good that you can do like $50. You can be a character in one of their games like can run, play a character*. But they know their audience very well. Their audience is middle-aged guys, who are into tabletop gaming, that's it. Which is like enjoying a resurgence, and, they involve their audience. They talk to them directly and they do really well on Patreon. What was it like for you and that Patreon journey? Like did you ever feel, oh, no, I can't do this, going to ask for money when you started out or did it come naturally?
Ian Sanders I did because you have that natural, British reticence to do that and in the end, I thought that I'm spending a lot of time on this. There are some costs in producing this stuff. I would like to be able to do this on a more permanent basis rather than sort of like a side hustle and it sort of grew. There was content on there that was not in the published episode. So there were outtakes and things like that, that I put up. I do zoom get-togethers with certain levels of Patreon, so there's engagement there. I'm posting probably at least three or four times a month. I'm *wary of sort of bombarding them with, every little thing that I'm up to and stuff like that. With most of the authors that we have because as well as doing the eye witness interviews, we do author interviews with any, cold war books that are coming up to be published. So we often do giveaways there for them as well. And that really helps with social media engagement. So in addition to Patreon, I have almost 12,000 Twitter followers as well which helps there as well. But mainly the feeling I get, I really should serve them around this is that they want, they're interested in the content and they believe in the project. They want me to continue preserving these relatively unknown stories of cold war history and to keep finding more and more for them is the main reason there. I mean, one of the things that did make it take off was this (Coke back to the. And we say, look at that, see, this is the sought. After Coldwell conversation, streaks coaster gets almost quite nice is an otherwise quite serious subject. You can have a bit of a joke around getting one of these.)* This is your badge of authenticity with cold war conversations. And that worked quite well. When I introduce that, that they'd start to, raise the Patreon, but I think most people really are Patreons because they want to support the project and they want to support me and they want to hear more content.
Graham Brown Yeah, I think it's great. What would you think about it now? You may or may not be aware that Spotify and Apple are going to start offering subscription models on their platforms, micropayments. Have you sort of looked into that? Is there anything that you've considered, have you looked at any sort of alternative charging models as well for your podcast.
Ian Sanders I have looked into it. I mean, what I do want to make sure is that the bulk of the content is free for people to listen to because that's really why I started the project was to make this available as widely as possible, but as it's expanded I do look at other options around, raising revenue aside from Patreon. And so I have done a few bits of advertising for publishers where they can get pre-roll and post-roll ads. Luckily with my host, I can dynamically place those on so they can be on every episode, all the 176 of them, I think now, so that proved quite successful, but I'm very conscious of my listeners. So I'm not going to be advertising razorblades or things like that on there. I want to make sure that whatever is on there is relevant to the cold war and relevant to the content that they want to listen to.
Graham Brown Yeah. Well, I think it's amazing. I've really enjoyed just being part of the journey today, talking to you as well. I love what you're doing. I really do. By privilege to be able to speak to people who are passionate about what they do in podcasting, I think there's been a real sort of flourishing. And even in the last 18 months, we've seen a real boom, of people doing stuff and finding audiences important, which is, I think the amazing part of all of this in, is that, there always was audiences. It's just that maybe they didn't have the platform or maybe it just wasn't mainstream enough for people to own up and admit that they're into this stuff. And now you're seeing people saying screw that, it's like, I'm into this now and I'm going to listen to this.
Ian Sanders Yeah. But there is still a huge number of people out there who haven't discovered podcasts. So there is still a big, big audience out there. And I think, from my point of view, one of the things that I think has been important to my listeners is consistency. So I started three years ago and every week without fail I've published an episode, even when I have COVID two weeks, but that was because I planned ahead. I had episodes backed up. They were set to just fire off the next few Saturdays ahead, but that's helped build the audience. Cause you know, I get lovely emails from people saying, you know what? I look forward to sitting down on a Saturday night and listening to your latest episode, you feel God, I've got quite a responsibility here now. This isn't just, this is nice to do that, there are people there who really look forward to the content and are really loyal listeners. And, I mean, I'm indebted to them too, that they helped me to continue producing this stuff, there's plenty, more stories out there to come.
Graham Brown Absolutely. You've started something in, even when he's sick in bed with COVID, he's still, (I have about that at the Manson machine) *. It's a genius. It's awesome, I really enjoyed this. It was a good chat.