I didn't realize when I was overweight how bad it was. I would say because you get so used to the lifestyle that you're living. If I'm 50, I don't want to look back at my late 20s and realize that I didn't get the best out of that period and wasn't my best self during that period.
The realization of that sentence, that idea is what triggered it for me. Do you feel like a fraud? Do you feel like you're not qualified to talk about cycling?
the more more time that I spend in the industry, whether it's podcasting about the industry, talking to writers in the industry, or even on like actual traditional media stations and so forth, when I'm invited there, the more experiences I have, the more I will lose that imposttor syndrome. Like my history of how I went into cycling is about the most weird storyline that you could hear because Benji, welcome to the road cycling podcast. Thank you very much.
Thank you very much. I appreciate the invitation. I want to start off if you don't mind chatting about a sensitive topic and you put a YouTube video out about it.
Your weight. It's a it's a story that's actually quite personal to me. H my dad actually suffered basically his whole life for as long as I can remember with his weight.
Like yeah, he's up 25 26 stone for a large part of his life. And I kind of grew up seeing a lot of the limitations that that brings. And if I'm completely honest, it's the reason why I started chasing pro cycling contracts.
The external reason I told everyone was, "Oh, I want to try and ride the tour to France." And yeah, but that wasn't the real reason. That was like my, you know, my shield that I had up so I didn't have to be vulnerable to the world.
The real reason was I never wanted to have those lifestyle limitations that he had. So I was just going to an excess to chase that. Uh let's I want to talk about your story if you're cool talking about it.
Did you always carry weight? Like what were you like as a kid? As a kid I was a fit guy.
I played football as a kid. I was uh very much active playing out there with the kids in the neighborhood and so forth. But I think when I turned 13, uh there was this medical issue with my dad where my parents sat me on the couch when they uh when I arrived home from school and I noticed that well there was something wrong and they started talking about the fact that my dad had gone to the hospital and that they noticed that um he had supposedly lung cancer which lung tumor correctly.
Uh so that was not great news. Let's be honest about that. And it was a wild ride from there because then it turned out not to be a lung tumor.
Turned out to be a lung absis, but they did like something to it in the hospital that accidentally made it explode because they they thought it was a lung tumor. And eventually he landed in like a coma of two months, which yeah, was a a pretty devastating period that basically launched me into an unhealthy lifestyle from the healthy lifestyle that I had. And that's how I got overweight basically not in one go but the gradual change of lifestyle throughout that period and later on my dad's okay by the way like he's recovered fully that's an important part god that miracle but when it comes to like my lifestyle that's something I had to change in the in the last year and um yeah so half my life basically I would say the thing when it comes to me is that I didn't realize when I was overweight how bad it was I would say because you get so used to the lifestyle that you're living that it becomes the baseline and you forget that it's not okay for that to be the baseline until at a certain point where you start maybe having some health issues or you start realizing that your life is limited whether it's on a a mental confidence side which I had and the limits physically of being able to do stuff which I also noticed.
So all that combining suddenly gets you to a moment where you're like maybe this is the moment where I need to properly do something about it which for me was uh in November 2021. Did you have a moment that was the catalyst for change? I think I did as in it was during November uh 2021 where it was a combination of the three things that I mentioned earlier where on one end when it comes to the personal confidence I noticed okay this is the time I've I've got the momentum now if I want to make proper content here I've got to start showing my face and everything I got to start being confident on camera in the way that I am stuff like that but next to that also I had some health issues when it comes to acid reflux and so forth that started showing up and I was like maybe this is not a good thing and I need to do something about it.
So all those factors combined next to the fact that I'm talking about cyclists and judging them and so forth on a podcast and then you think about myself and I'm like I'm not really the most sporty guy in the neighborhood. So maybe I should do something about it and maybe some more people will have more respect then for what I say in the process as well. So all those kind of things kind of rambled into one and made me realize okay this is the moment that I need to do something about it.
this is the moment that I need to change something. But I knew that changing your lifestyle isn't something that goes in like one go. It's it's a something that you need to build consistency on.
And that consistency is I think where I've got a really good mindset as in I didn't expect to lose 10 kgs in a day in two days in three days. Like obviously that's impossible. May maybe there's like some magical trick that I don't know about but I severely doubt it.
So, I knew like maybe if I like try to lose 10 kilos in the next year, I feel like that's a very healthy tempo, it's not outrageous and I feel like it's manageable to be able to do it time-wise with the other stuff that I've got going on in my life. And I also had some people around me. Uh there's this other YouTuber, Matt Lane, that helped me out when it comes to like the mindset and every few weeks had a a call with me and was like uh trying to like keep me in order when it comes to my consistency and so forth.
And the accountability of that helped. I think I've never had like the goal of I want to become a cyclist and so forth, but I did have that like thought process of I want to become like I think the the actual catalyst was just all that combining and me coming to the thought process of if I'm 50, I don't want to look back at my late 20s and realize that I didn't get the best out of that period and wasn't my best self during that period. And I think the realization of that sentence, that idea is what triggered it for me.
And then I switched my mindset towards okay now I need to make sure I do things in a healthier lifestyle and I agree that it's about your identification towards that and so but I think for me it was more of a gradual process where I on purpose made sure that that I didn't instantly identify as like the healthiest person otherwise I would think to myself I would never survive if I was too strict if I wasn't a bit lenient when it comes to like ah I've got a day where I'm over my calories for the day. It's not the end of the world. Just do better tomorrow.
Like, if I was strict to myself, I might have beaten myself up for it and I would have fallen out of the loop and it might have gone bad again. So, I think it's also useful to be lineed in some shape or form to make sure that you're not too strict on that identity piece. Like, do you feel like a fraud?
Do you feel like you're not qualified to talk about cycling? Because me and Ned struggled with this. Ned said he still feels like an outsider in the sport and he's made to feel like an outsider by you know the cycling establishment and I was giving him the example like I grew up in a house that was like we TV on or we cycling on the TV from my earliest memories.
Yeah. And my dad was fixing bikes you know as a part-time mixer fixing them up and sell was always working on bikes from the age of five, but yet I'll go to my dad's house and I'll watch, you know, one of the classics and, you know, Rem put down, you know, absolutely breakthrough ride and I'll still feel like an outsider. My dad will be like, "Ah, that's nothing.
Merks was twice the rider he is." And it's it's a weird thing we do in cycling where we make people feel like they're on the outside. Have you experienced that?
Uh, I do feel like that's an experience that I've had before. It's also something that a lot of people in cycling probably have had in the sense that over the last year my personal confidence and so forth in the space have grown quite severely true to experience true to self development and so forth. So the more and more as time goes on, the more time that I spend in the industry, whether it's podcasting about the industry, talking to writers in the industry, talking uh with media professionals in the industry, or even on like actual traditional media stations and so forth when I'm invited there, the more experiences I have, the more I will lose that imposttor syndrome.
Is that if that makes sense? because that I I do feel like I had that feeling about a year year and a half ago where like my history of how I went into cycling is about the most weird storyline that you could hear because I was a gamer as a kid. I played this game called Pro Cycling Manager on PC where I like pretended to be a manager of a cycling team and hey ho my riders won the race and that further built into a YouTube channel which I run on the side where I game on that YouTube channel when it comes to those games and I try to make storylines with that and so forth next to the stuff I do where out of that gaming YouTube cycling vibe that I had grew the opportunities that I had in the space for example doing the podcast with Lantern Rou Patrick that grew from that and then from the podcast uh people in in teams started to get to know these guys actually know something about this.
So, it's kind of something that evolves at the start. You're like, "What am I doing here?" Like, you also notice that some people don't like you when you get into the space from that area.
There's established people in the industry that I know 100% won't like what I do because one, I'm sometimes criticizing what they do in the sport, and two, I might be interfering with their piece of the puzzle, with their income perhaps in the sport. Like when I look at Cyclop Media, like I I've started to push into the world of Twitter a little bit more in the last month and I've noticed, you know, I'm struck when you put something up on Twitter. Like you tongue and cheek took one of my tweets and reposted that as one of your tweets and the engagement on it insane.
Crazy. Like it was it was hilarious. But the engagement on it was like I was just looking going on this.
It was brilliant. I loved it. I loved it.
I loved it. H no never feel bad taking a piss out of me. I can take it.
Well, uh, but I look at, you know, Cyclist Magazine, who I do a podcast with occasionally, so I don't want to rag on them, but Cycling Weekly, any of these companies, they put up a tweet and it's just it's tumble weeds because they slept at the wheel. They don't understand these platforms. There was an arrogance that said, "We have the top spot.
We can't be beaten." And now comes along Lantern Rouge podcast. Now comes along, yeah, you know, our podcasts.
Uh, who else is doing another good one? H Spven Tuft is doing a brilliant one. The Back on the Bus podcast.
Like these sort of podcasts are coming along and it's like, "Oh, hold on. Now you're doing 10 times, 20 times, 100 times the downloads." Yeah.
That these podcasts are doing, they're going to get pissed off. And their revenue model is so based on Like their revenue model is based on like dynamically inserted banner ads on their website. So the more clicks, the more revenue they generate.
But to get clicks, they have to come up with increasingly more spammy titles to get those clicks. So it becomes a race to the bottom on who can come up with the spamiest title. And the quality of journalism is just disappearing.
And it's a weird space for them at the moment. And so I can see why they push back against someone like you coming with a new idea to you're you're coming for their their livelihood. You're coming for their family's livelihood.
No need to make me feel bad about it. But like I agree and it sucks when you see like companies like Cycling Tips for example getting rid of people that are actively contributing in the industry. Um and those people end up not having a job within the journalism industry.
Like I feel bad when I see that because I do want those people to be able to have that livelihood and so forth. But it's also because that industry when it comes to the traditional media outlets like for example cycling dims like for example the others they don't necessarily go into the other spaces that are working at the moment and yes podcasts work but podcasts are very much something where the people that are on the podcast are also important like this might sound really weird. I'm not trying to pat my own back or anything, but the personality vibe, the fact that it's people doing a podcast changes a lot, I think, compared to a company hosting a podcast.
I think that's a very vital difference between those two aspects. And I think that's also one of the parts that changes that. But also, like I come as a YouTuber into the spectrum, hey, like I started off as a YouTuber, I'm still a YouTuber.
That's how I see myself next to that pro cycling commentator. Maybe I'm I'm diving into this world from that point of view. And I noticed that in other industries and so forth, there's a similar thing where influencers are influencers are actively like coming in and building things and the rest of the traditional side of things within that industry are slow to react towards that.
And with us, we came in with the podcast in 2020 just before the tour fr in co years. So if I didn't have that extra time because of remote work at that time because of co then I'm not sure that podcast would have existed. So it's kind of like the small things but we started in that moment and we grew from there and every step of the way I do feel like they underestimate what we do and I like that because it means you can ambush whatever happens in the future if that makes sense.
Like I'm not actively trying to take down industries here or anything like that that I'm not trying to conquer this space or anything like I think there's space for plenty of people to do what they want creatively when it comes to the ideas that they have. As long as it's quality content, it's going to reach a surface. And that's at least how I believe this works.
But there's also the aspect of like I'm a content creator. I work on the podcast. I earn a living with that podcast.
I earn on my YouTube. I earn somewhat of a living with my YouTube, but there's plenty of stuff I do next to get that doesn't make me earn a living. But we do that.
Like the reason you post on Twitter is not because you monetize directly your tweets. It's because you want to put stuff out there. And next to that, it's an idea that, oh, this can indirectly lead to more people listening to the podcast in the future.
This can indirectly lead to more people watching YouTube videos if we start that YouTube channel as roadman cycling podcast in the future. So I feel like they're too focused on one thing all the time and most of the time on the traditional things. Yeah.
It's very short-term focus when you're building more of a personal brand. Like I'm not looking at what the podcast can be like now. I'm looking at what the podcast can be like in in a decade.
If I don't if I go six days a week for a decade, what's my attention grabb look like then? Yeah. But I think the big difference when I listen to you guys on Lantern Rouge podcast or specifically when I listen to you, I'd listen to you more than the the other co-host, I don't always agree with you and I don't always think you're correct, which is natural.
That's fine. But I do always believe you're honest and you're representing your opinion to with the facts you have at that time. When I read these cycling tips, cycling news, I don't always believe them to be honest.
I don't know the motivation behind it. I don't know who's funneling the ad dollars in. I don't like I try to be super transparent on the podcast.
I've no hidden sponsors. I've no like, you know, my sponsors are at the moment Factor, Athletic Greens, and HVMN Ketone Company. Like, I'm totally transparent about that.
I'm not sure with legacy media that you have that feeling of honesty. I don't watch the news or I'm going to couple cycle news platforms into that and feel like they're telling me the truth all the time. I feel like there's an angle or they don't want to offend someone or and I think that's a reason they're dying.
I think there's an argument there when it comes to access journalism as in I feel like the traditional media that we are speaking about. I often fear that the stuff that they write is also from an idea of okay I can't step on the toes of these riders on the toes of these teams and so forth because those teams and those riders might reduce the access that we have to those teams and riders in the future. I think that's an idea that really is real in the space of cycling journalism.
And then we look at how I as a cycling commentator for example or Twitter or on YouTube can talk about cycling. I'm not limited by that stuff. Like I don't care if a team starts to hate me because I have an opinion on it.
Like Astanos got me blocked on Twitter. I don't I don't give a anything about that. Why did they block you?
Well, it was a weird story. I tried to get an interview with like a Spanish writer on their team and I was speaking to the social media manager and I started talking about um uh well can he speak decent enough English for the podcasts or will he not be comfortable for that? And I think they mistook that decent enough as me insulting his English.
And then they started telling to other people that they blocked me because uh I said bad things about the team which I I found that pretty funny cuz like in all honesty is not looking that amazing except for Mark Cavendish that joining the team for the next year. So it's not like it's the endless thing of losing contact there. But it's also what we do doesn't depend on riders and teams.
I love having riders as friends, as like connections to talk to, as people that I can follow and admire in the sport and so forth. teams as well. I like having connections in the teams and so forth because that betters the content and so forth, but there's the aspect of like the content doesn't depend on that because I noticed that our interviews and so forth we do most of the time get worse viewing rates and so forth and the episodes that me and Patrick do or Patrick and me do just like that because the people seem more interested in what we have to say about the sport than necessarily what a staff member on this team has to say about the sport.
Occasionally I do like having that on because that gives the people that are listening a different kind of perspective into the sport. But hey, that's that's a take I have. Isn't that a weird mentality?
Like I always look at I can't remember who I heard saying this in a sort of a business building talk and he was saying there's two ways to have the biggest building in town. Yeah. You can you can build the biggest building in town just bigger than all the bigger the biggest buildings that are there or you can build a small building and aim to rip everyone else's building down.
And that just for me has never been an attractive way to try and tear others down because agree, you know, I want to hit a million downloads a week, but you know what? I want you to hit a million downloads a week as well. like we can all win on this and there's so few of us like trying to tread the same path that there's definite benefit in having a collaborative ecosystem rather than a competitive one.
Yeah. And I it's also when it comes to like being a YouTuber and so of when I post stuff on YouTube, I know that it's beneficial to collaborate with people that are doing well on the pro on the platform because like people like to consume other people's content and that's fine. the the way to use that is not to devour that other person's content because then you're going to alienize the people that are watching that content from that other person.
It's better to have some kind of crossover collaboration. Figure out what the good parts about the other content are, the good parts about yours and see how you can like fit that together. try and find friendships across content in that sense and make sure that the people that are viewing the stuff in the space whether it's readers whether it's listeners and so forth don't become the victims of quarrels that happen in the space I watched one of your videos on your YouTube channel where you were managing a Zift team and it's absolutely it's absolutely brilliant like the idea of I just jump I've only kind of found Swift I was quite vocal about absolutely hating Zift hating indoor training and it's just been you know just such a waste of time I thought for a long time and then like I say strong opinions held loosely now I just absolutely love it so but I've only started diving into Zift races you know I've had a couple of guests on the podcast like Jay Vine and Ashley Moasio who are both big Zifters and they kind of talked me into giving it a a good go so I've only started doing a couple of Zift races but the analysis and the level of detail you went into for this swift race.
It reminds me of being in like Aqua Blue team meetings and listening to my old director Timmy Barry breaking down races. Like you're going through and analyzing these races on full director Sportif. Like is this a parody or are you like are you actually analyzing the races in this depth or is that theater for Zift?
I think it has two sides. I do think that the analysis that I I do in that series actually helps those riders perform in the long run. So of like I I have the experience now of doing video analysis and and tactical consultancy for Yambo Vizma.
That was a pretty successful season. I won't take credit there. Like I'll take like a tiny bit of credit like 0.
001% or something. When it comes to the Zift series, I was like first of all it's a good story. If it fails then it's pretty hilarious.
People are going to love watching that stuff if it fails. And next to that, if for example, we go through the series, I need to make sure that I try and apply the analysis that I know from the actual cycling space, like try and figure out how that applies to Zift, how we can make sure that these riders can actually perform better by working together in races instead of going free-for-all throughout these races. whether we can find ways in team time trials for example to calculate the amount of wads that a certain rider needs to do at the front to be able to sustain that and to be able to get the best possible time I would have that team time trial all that kind of stuff what are the best strategies when it comes to Zift it's also kind of learning process because there's a lot of things in Zift like that Zift racing league tournament there's teams in that there's plenty of DS's of those teams that do similar things that just aren't in a YouTube series that actually analyze their races and try and with their friends if they're like if they've got like a friends team on Zift, we we got to try and do better next time.
Come on, how can we make this Steam time trial go better next week? So that that exists behind the scenes and it's kind of fun to like display that in some sense and it was fun going into that from someone with zero Zift racing experience to then apply real world cycling ideas toward it in some sense. So there's about 50% the idea of I can actually do something here.
50% it could be good content even if it fails. I spoke with uh Josh Porto who is the founder of Silka and massive uh proponent of innovation in cycling and changing up engineering systems. And we spoke about 3D printing and he firmly believes that is the future of all bike design.
and he's hiring 3D printers at the moment. And he noticed a strange phenomenon. The very best 3D printers he has are kids straight out of college who know the skill, but they've no experience in any typical engineering background.
They've no bike experience. And he said they're not coming in with preconceptions of how this industry works or what the limit on innovation is. Yeah.
When I look at your analysis, I think you've benefited a lot from not coming up through the ecosystem of being a bike racer sitting in on team meetings. You're not colored by that. It's such a fresh perspective like looking at your analysis of a Swift race.
You were profiling the riders. You were looking at the parkour. You actually went out and you reconed the course which is brilliant and I loved it.
Then you're building a strategy, equipment, powerups. like it's a 360 degree approach to performance. Did you how much of this did you take from Yumbbo Visma?
It's difficult to make that comparison as in when it comes to world tour cycling teams, I feel like how I view the sport is that the sport teams of a team often have so much stuff on the plate and have so much stuff in their own role to do that it's very difficult of them to do everything in depth. for example, video analysis, race analysis, they can't view every race. They barely have the time to watch the race they're in in the evening.
So to have someone that specifically works on that during races and so forth, that is able to see so much more because he sees more races that is able to overanalyze every single scenario 20 times over what he has gone to. Gives so much more perspective there. And when it comes to the Zift series, if I have to be honest about it, that was a very short-term series.
As in, I was speaking to Zift about the series about two weeks before it launched, the six week series where every single week the race happened and there was about a a three-day turnover for the actual video to come out in some sense. So, I have a lot of editing work for that. The amount of preparation I have left then means that I've got about three days of preparation for the next race of which two of which should go to other content whether it's a podcast and so forth.
So I only had like one day to analyze the races if if that was a longer term project. I think there's so much more that could have been tapped into. For example, analyzing those team time trials, seeing which rider hit their pools completely, which rider didn't hit their pools completely.
Is this something that happens consistently over team time trials? Am I overrating each individual rider too much in this team time trial when it comes to the ws I expect them to put out over a certain amount of time? There's so many small things that I would love to reanalyze if I have like 70 hours in my day during this series, but that's not the case.
So, I'd say this series was fun, but there's so much more potential to try and do that next year, for example, in in the off season if Zift is willing to do so. We're we're talking about it at the moment, but um to do it more in depthly because there's so much more there. Where do you see yourself in the cycling ecosystem?
You've you're seem to be at the precipice of reaching out and almost having too many options. And I I've struggled with this personally a lot through the years where I went away, I was a lawyer, went, you know, tried cycling for a uh full-time for quite a while after that. Then I came back to Dublin and I just got distracted almost shiny object syndrome on a business scale where I started setting up I thought I was a superhero and I was setting up five, six businesses, trying to raise venture capital rounds.
buying cafes and I just got so distracted that the quality of my work any one of those projects could have taken off and been a super big hit but because I diluted my attention across so many different areas that it just fails like I'm wonder with you is there a a danger of that happening where you're getting pulled you know you're brilliant on the television you're podcast and you're very talented YouTube you know you have a talent for that the director sportif the video analysis if you chose any one of those and went all in on it, you could be absolutely phenomenal. But I wonder if you spread yourself too thin, are you in danger of, you know, the old I think it's the old stoic saying, the the man who chases two rabbits catches neither. I think when it comes to the stuff I do, what I try to make sure is that it all has cross pollution when it comes to the people that listen, that watch, that read whatever I do.
I think I just want to build my content. I want to make quality content now that I've got the opportunity, the momentum to do so. And there are opportunities that come left and right like in Belgian media and so forth.
But I'm going to limit myself to stuff to make sure that the main thing that I do, which is the YouTube channel and the podcast, those two things are not heard by the other things I do. H Benji, I couldn't let you go without uh getting a few 2023 season predictions from the from the main man. What are we going to do?
Milan Sanan Ramo, throw me out a name. is there's this guy on Bahrain that there's about a 5% chance that he even makes it in the final but if he does he can compete Jonathan Milan which is a track rider an Italian and he's able to sustain short hills and then have a sprint afterwards and it's really out there today complete dark horse but it would be boring if I chose a mainstream rider so Yonathan Milan wins Milano Sanmo Benji I'm super excited to see what direction you choose for 2023 and wish you continued success for the podcast, the YouTube channel. I'm going to link up all your stuff and encourage everyone to go and check it out.
Angie, thanks for joining me on the road podcast. Thanks, mate. Enjoyed it.