Conrad Thompson is quickly becoming a popular and successful voice in the busy world of wrestling related podcasts. He co-hosts “Something To Wrestle With” along side longtime WWE producer Bruce Prichard.
He also just launched a podcast with longtime WCW announcer Tony Schiavone called “What Happened When.”
Conrad took time out from his busy schedule to join me on my audio podcast “Wrestling Reality” and talked about a number of things.
Transcription courtesy of @PeterBahi:
On How He Started Podcasting:
It was by total accident. I’ve been advertising my mortgage company on the radio for about 10 years now. We do a lot of recorded commercials, and then we do some live spots and morning drive and afternoon drive. Through different course of events, I befriended Ric Flair, and when Ric had an opportunity to do his first podcast on CBS, he asked me to just sit in with him and ask him fan questions. He knew that I understood the wrestling business, and would not try to make him look bad. I had enough experience in radio to make it passable. Of course, I never went to school for broadcasting or radio, or anything like that, but he just knew that I did it everyday and try to help him where he needed to be. At the end of that episode, he dug it and CBS dug it, so we just kept going with it. When you befriend Ric Flair, you meet everybody, so I had an opportunity to meet Bruce [Prichard], and with the amount of stories that this guy has, this would make a great podcast. Not the traditional interview format that most wrestling podcasts do, this would be something new, and when it worked, I thought about who would be able to talk about the Jim Crockett Promotions/WCW side, and that was Tony Schiavone.
On What Makes Something to Wrestle With & What Happened When So Successful:
I think our audience is really a different audience than the average podcast listener, because for whatever reason, wrestling fans have this obsession with the details from behind the scenes, and for whatever reason, wrestling podcasts by and large just became an interview format so you have an hour of two guys who used to work together tell stories, and then eventually that same guest will be on everybody’s podcast because you have a unique challenge with those podcasts of 52 guests a year, and that is a lot. So, you can’t help but have some overlap, and I think because we never have a guest we don’t have to tell the same story that everyone else has heard, and we kind of blew up the norm. It was common for a podcast to be under an hour, under 45 minutes; yet we are doing 2, 3, sometimes 4 hour shows because we want to cover a topic as thoroughly as possible, and we want to make each show like its own little book, it’s own little chapter so to speak.
You can hear more including:
On His Favorite Episode of the Podcast That He Enjoyed Most and Most Underrated Episode (6:32 mark)
On His Relationship with Vince Russo (9:00 mark)
On the Research Involved in Preparing for Each Episode (10:42 mark)
Advice He Has For People Wanting to Start a Podcast (12:35 mark)
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