Talking about all things love, life, and everything in between, Life Uncut is hosted by Bachelor alumni Brittany Hockley and Laura Byrne. Life Uncut launched in July 2019 and is currently sitting in the top three in both the Top 100 and Top 100 All-Australian podcast ranker – rubbing shoulders with pods like Hamish and Andy and Casefile.
See More: Podcast Week: Hitting the right notes on LiSTNR + behind Life Uncut
Mediaweek spoke to Hockley and Byrne about making the podcast and what comes next.
Baring All On Air
Nothing is off limits on Life Uncut. The pair say that sharing some of the more personal stories to such a large audience has gotten easier over time.
Hockley: “At the beginning of the podcast I was definitely a little bit more reserved, and I didn’t really know where I wanted to go in terms of how much I wanted to share. It was such a learning experience, and I thought, let’s just start with a baseline of talking about a lot of things that people already know, and see what happens. Over the two years, we’ve become a lot more unfiltered and a lot more raw in topics we talk about because I realised that these are the topics that are actually going to really help people and make an impact. That’s what we want to do. We want to make people feel like they’re not so alone.”
Byrne: “We were a bit reserved in the beginning, because we came from that reality TV world where you have to be so careful about what you say, because you’re worried that it’s going to be edited in a way that might be held against you. The great thing about having our own podcast is that it’s our stories coming from us, and there’s a real level of control that comes with that. I find a lot of comfort in the fact that I’m able to tell the stories that I tell but the words are actually coming from my mouth.”
There are downsides to being so open in a public space, however.
Byrne: “The hardest thing for me, it’s not so much sharing the story – sharing the stories is fine – for me it’s being misquoted or having one sentence that I said taken out and repurposed not in context to create a sensationalised story that doesn’t at all match up to what was actually said on the podcast.
“Over the years Britt and I have become a lot more comfortable anytime those sorts of articles come out, we can laugh it off now. We’re really lucky because we have such an awesome engaged community who listened to the podcast, and they know better.”
Talking Back
The Life Uncut fanbase is a particularly active one, something that neither Hockley or Byrne take for granted.
Hockley: “I don’t think we realised how engaged our audience was. We know they’re engaged, because we engage with them every day on multiple platforms. But I don’t think we realised until a few other people in the media mentioned it to us and said, ‘Do you realise that you have one of the most engaged audiences?’
“The thing that I’m most proud of is that there are a lot of audiences and communities that are just as engaged, but ours is so positively engaged. We’re really proud of the community we’ve built.”
Byrne: “We’ve always really had a close connection with our audience, and that’s only grown over time. It hasn’t something that we’ve moved away from, we’ve leaned into it as the years have gone by.”
Part of having an audience as responsive as the Life Uncut listeners is getting feedback, something that the pair take very seriously.
Hockley: “We’re constantly getting messages every day saying, ‘we just want to say thank you, because you’ve made me realise that I’m normal’. That’s the best part about it.”
Byrne: “It can be easy when feedback comes in to just think, oh, that’s just one person amongst the masses. But we genuinely read all of the feedback that comes in, and even if one person says, ‘Hey, I really didn’t like this’, we will talk about what it was that was liked or disliked about that segment, and then we make up our mind about it. We really care about the content we put out, so I think that the attention to the detail and the content that’s really helped us to be able to grow our audience and to allow the audience to feel listened to.”
Looking Ahead
With Covid restrictions easing across the country, Hockley and Byrne are hoping there will be more in person events in the near future.
Hockley: “We’ve got some things on the horizon, and some actually some really big exciting things that are just about to drop that we can’t actually talk about just yet. But we want to continue doing what we’re doing. We would love to be able to get into an international audience as well – we’re just starting to get the fans in the UK and New Zealand.
“We’d love to be able to meet up with our audience more. So whether that’s a little meetup, get togethers, live show things like that, it’s just obviously very hard to have that connection throughout Covid.”
Byrne: “The big one is something that we’ve been talking about since before lockdown happened, we wanted to start potentially doing some bigger scale meetups. At the moment our community do their own meetup groups, there’s loads of them around Australia, where like minded people get together. We would like to organise some more formal ones.”
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Top Image: Brittany Hockley and Laura Byrne