Perpetual Chess Podcast: 500+ clips and 3M+ views from the archive

Perpetual Chess has been running for years. Ben Johnson sits down with a strong player every week and talks for an hour. By the time I started, there were hundreds of episodes sitting in the archive, none of them clipped.

Over roughly three years I cut more than 500 clips out of that catalogue. They have done north of 3M views.

A podcast is a harder clip source than it looks

Most chess content has a board to cut to. A podcast does not. You have two people talking, sometimes for forty minutes, and the entire value of any given moment is in what was said and who said it.

That removes every visual crutch. There is no brilliant move to land on, no reaction shot of a position turning. If the sentence is not interesting, no amount of editing makes the clip work.

So the job stops being an editing job and becomes a listening job. The edit is maybe twenty percent of the time. The rest is deciding what is worth cutting at all.

How I pick

Look for the claim, not the topic

A guest explaining how they prepare openings is a topic. A guest saying they stopped studying openings entirely and got stronger is a claim. Topics do not travel. Claims do, because a claim invites disagreement, and disagreement is the cheapest engagement there is.

The clip has to survive without the guest’s name

It is tempting to lean on who is speaking. Most of the audience scrolling past has no idea who any given grandmaster is. If the clip only works because you recognise the face, it will only work for people who already subscribe, which defeats the point.

Cut in at the sentence, not the breath

Podcast audio has a rhythm that makes it very easy to start a clip two seconds early. Those two seconds of throat-clearing are where the swipe happens. I start on the first stressed word of the actual sentence, every time.

What made it repeatable

Three years is long enough that taste alone stops scaling. I built a pass system: one listening pass at speed marking timestamps, one pass ranking those timestamps against the claim test, then batch editing only what survived.

Roughly one in six marked moments made it to a finished clip. That ratio has been stable for years, and knowing it is what makes the workload predictable instead of open-ended.

Result

500+ clips, 3M+ views, cut from a weekly show that was already being made anyway. No extra filming, no reshoots, no additional demand on the host.

Thanks man, good job on the last clips.

Ben Johnson, Perpetual Chess Podcast

Tools

Premiere Pro and After Effects for the edit. Claude for first-pass transcript triage across long episodes, and Higgsfield where a clip needed a visual that did not exist in the footage. The judgement about which moments are worth cutting stays mine.

More on the wider approach in chess content repurposing. If you have a podcast archive nobody has touched, book a call, or put it straight into the monthly Shorts-only package.