“It took me 16 months to get John Lennox onto The Diary of a CEO - it’s a lesson in God’s hope.”

SPCK’s Head of Marketing and Publicity, Rio Summers, spent sixteen months working behind the scenes to bring author and apologist John Lennox to one of the world’s biggest podcasts. This is the remarkable story of persistence, prayer, algorithms and what happened when Lennox finally sat down with Steven Bartlett.

By the time I arrived at the studio of the Diary of a CEO podcast, clutching a prawn mayo sandwich and running on four hours’ sleep, it had already been a sixteen-month journey. To get SPCK author John Lennox and his books God, AI and the End of History and the newly released memoir My Story onto the second most-listened-to podcast in the world, 17.2 million followers, episodes regularly hitting millions of views, had taken a grassroots strategy: writing to the show directly, pitching to adjacent podcasts to build John’s profile and grow into their sightlines, working the algorithm, making sure that when someone typed into Google, or increasingly into ChatGPT, “can you be a scientist and a Christian?” or “what does AI mean for human identity?” or, more simply, “God and AI”, John Lennox was the name that came up.