Dirty Genes Podcast

Ben Lynch, ND, is the Founder and President of Seeking Health and responsible for developing a novel metabolic and epigenetic system in his book Dirty Genes. He further expanded this system into a genetic report called StrateGene, which is the basis for his supplement formulations. With this complex system at the root of Seeking Health products, the company wanted to educate their customers and connect them to Ben and his ideas.  

Seeing the success of other influencers in the wellness industry, Ben decided to create a video podcast series.  Project Manager Katie Bonelli was tapped to launch the podcast and approached me to discuss the scope and requirements for such a project. We worked together to outline the strategy, technical considerations, and resources necessary and tapped Ben’s Executive Assistant Danielle Day to help with coordination and management. 

Ben was excited about the project and wanted to launch quickly. So, with a team assembled, we started tackling the first hurdle of the project: establishing a comfortable and quality setup for recording.  

Ben intended to create a mix of solo content and interviews, and he wished to do most of his recording from home. In order to maximize his output while simultaneously offering him flexibility to record whenever he had time, I created a simple setup in his office that he could reliably operate himself. This consisted of a small Sony camera with a capture card and an industry classic Shure SM7B with an audio interface.  

Since Ben had a hard time conceptualizing the final product, we had him record two short initial episodes that we could use as examples of the complete produced show. Katie and Danielle would also take those preview episodes to secure guests. This also fit the model for the project, which was to start releasing episodes early, before the podcast was completely polished, and grow the production quality and complexity over time. 

My first step after receiving the initial footage was to create a feedback and tracking processes. I adopted Frame.io as an internal tool for notes and review and worked with Katie to develop an Asana workflow that would help us track the episodes and necessary contributors. 

After a round of notes from Katie and Danielle, I jumped into editing. I was aggressive with my content cuts, focusing on reinforcing Ben’s confidence and authority, but made sure to leave a conversational tone.  It was important that the episodes would still feel approachable and not overly edited, even though Dr. Lynch preferred recording episodes “off the cuff” instead of strongly outlined.  

Before sharing the first episodes with Ben I wanted to add the final polish of branding so he could see things close to their final form. I produced the intro and outro animations in After Effects and kept the branding consistent with the podcast’s namesake book, Dirty Genes. I created fast-paced animation and strong music to keep energy up and hopefully create a brief and memorable brand that could last with the show. 

We presented the episodes to Ben along with specific notes for future recording and production. Ben was thrilled. We moved onto producing further episodes and booking interviews. After a small buffer of episodes was created, we launched the podcast which would be released weekly in video and audio formats.  

As the project moved forward the production team and I focused on ways to grow and improve the content and production value. We moved from conducing interviews over Zoom with guests’ own equipment to bringing guests into the studio at Seeking Health. However, the interviews also highlighted a growing problem that we were running into with compliance. 

Seeking Health is a supplement company and any content that it makes needs to be FDA compliant to confirm that it isn’t making inappropriate health claims. Dr. Lynch’s indirect interviewing style and guests’ lack of familiarity with compliance lead to good chunks of conversations being inappropriate for final air. 

In such cases it’s important to get very specific notes from our internal Regulatory Manager and aggressively cut sections with the most egregious risk levels. From that starting point I often had to creatively reorganize the interview to try and weave a cohesive story while still preserving the informal tone of the podcast.  I took advantage of cutting between cameras, using punch-ins, and even reusing reaction shots to cover otherwise rough edit points. 

The podcast ran weekly for 16 episodes with the top episode fetching over 200K views on YouTube.  Although viewership, the production process, and episode quality were all growing, Dr. Lynch eventually decided that he didn’t have the time to spend on the project and the podcast was put on hold.