Ford’s CEO became a podcaster with a little help from Tom Brady

When Spotify first approached Jim Farley with the idea of hosting a podcast, he gave it a cool reception.

The pitch: Farley, Ford Motor Co.’s chief executive, could interview his peers about leadership. He could record it on Saturdays, it was suggested. “My initial reaction was I have absolutely no interest in spending my Saturdays interviewing business leaders about leadership,” he told the L.A. Times.

With a little show business in his blood — the late “Saturday Night Live” star Chris Farley was his cousin — he thought he could come up with something a little livelier.

What if we made it about cars — people’s first cars, their relationship with cars — with a little leadership thrown in? Spotify said cool. With the Wednesday launch of his star-studded interview series, “Drive,” Farley goes into showbiz himself. Among his guests: Jimmy Kimmel, Dax Shepard and Tom Brady.

Combining car love with leadership and success wasn’t as hard as he thought it might be. In the episode with Brady, Farley said, the football megastar said he most admires “those who put the success of the enterprise ahead of themselves and focus on delivering.”

That’s corporate speak, but Brady put some real world into it: “He told me if you look at the parking lots of the

NFL teams, you’ll see that the most reliable players don’t have Ferraris and Lamborghinis. They drive normal cars.”

Farley, 59, worried that pulling off his role as entertaining would be hard. Back in the day, he’d accompany his cousin to “The Tonight Show” appearances. “I was there to make sure Chris didn’t do something stupid,” he said.

But everything’s relative. A preview of the interview has Farley holding his own in a riff about riding in the back of the family station wagon.

“I would put cardboard up and I was, like, 10 or 11 and I would start flipping off drivers who were passing us and then they would flip off my mom. And I, like, did that for three years — she had no idea.”