So What? Behind the Scenes of the Marketing Over Coffee Podcast

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In this episode of So What? you’ll learn the secrets behind the scenes of the popular marketing podcast, Marketing Over Coffee. Katie Robbert interviews John Wall, co-host of Marketing Over Coffee. He reveals his pre-production process, including how he uses a three-act structure for interview and non-interview episodes. You’ll discover the tech setup behind Marketing Over Coffee, as John shares his essential hardware and software, including his preferred microphone for capturing high-quality audio. Listen in to learn how John prepares for interviews and avoids asking the same questions you’ll hear on other marketing podcasts.

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So What? Behind the Scenes of the Marketing Over Coffee Podcast

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In this episode you’ll learn:

What software and hardware you need for a podcast
Best practices to keep an interview engaging
Tips from the host of Marketing Over Coffee

Transcript:

What follows is an AI-generated transcript. The transcript may contain errors and is not a substitute for listening to the episode.

Trust Insights Podcast Transcript – Behind the Scenes of Marketing over Coffee

Katie Robbert 00:21
All right. Well, hey! Howdy, everyone. Welcome to so what, the marketing, analytics, and insights live show. Chris is on a plane. I am pushing buttons all over the place. I don’t know if I’m pushing the right ones. Who knows? But we’re here, and it’s, actually, mistakes happen because we’re human.

Today’s episode is behind the scenes of the Marketing over Coffee podcast. John is the owner and host of Marketing over Coffee. You and Chris have been doing this podcast for the past, I think, 15.

John Wall 01:02
Yeah. 18. I think it’ll be, like, 19 in March or something like that.

Katie Robbert 01:09
And so, I’m sure you’ve refined your processes over the years, but I’m sure one of the questions you either get asked or you’re often thinking about is where does AI fit in? How much of this can I automate with AI? Or is that a question you even consider?

John Wall 01:28
I’ve never had that. We do hear some people tell you about where does AI fit into podcasting, but I think it’s still been too early for that. We’re seeing some stuff on image generation. We’re seeing some stuff on audio, on music. That’s not too bad. It’s coming. It’s getting closer, but the closest thing would be using AI to make clips of stuff that already exists, but nothing at the production. And it’s all pretty much post-production kind of stuff.

Katie Robbert 01:59
So you don’t feel like. So I know that there’s, like, AI editors out there that will edit the audio and video and take out stop words. Take out pauses. You don’t use anything like that at the moment.

John Wall 02:12
Yeah, the problem with all that stuff for me is it’s all the same: none of it is perfect. Like, stop words and things like that. Like, yeah, you can go through and you can grab 80% of just the “ums” and clip them out, and that works.

But as you get into more complicated interviews—like, actually, for another project I was doing a couple of months ago, about school shootings, people were talking about what had happened, and there’s pauses in there and people getting choked up—that’s the kind of stuff that you don’t want to delete. Like, that’s getting the story across in a more effective manner. And so the end result is I always listen to the whole thing before it goes out the door. So, I might as well be doing the clipping and editing myself.

John Wall 02:53
I mean, I have in the past used other production services to do some of the cleanup, and then I listen to it. And so it takes away, 60% of the cleanup work, but it’s still an hour. It’s an hour to go through the show versus an hour and 15.

Well, and we can talk about this more too if you want to dig down into it. But there is a whole thing of, there’s kind of just putting content out there and having it be available. More on an academic level of, it’s on the record and people can go get to it when they want to have questions answered or researching specific topics.

John Wall 03:33
But if you’re building a show and building a story that’s kind of more dramatic and requires a lot more massaging and you’re working with beats, and there’s a lot of things that go into how that final product sounds. And so that’s kind of a different thing. Tom Webster has written a lot about that in his latest book about how creating a podcast or creating content is one thing, but doing a show is something a little bit different.

Katie Robbert 03:58
So I know that you go through a pre-production process before every episode. Can you walk us through a little bit of what that looks like and how you get yourself ready if you have guests? One of the things that we also want to sort of touch upon before we actually do the live recording of Marketing over Coffee, so people can actually see what that looks like: how do you keep an interview engaging?

Like, I’m sure, over the course of 18 years, you’ve had some people on your show that have kind of dragged a little bit. So, can you talk a little bit about your pre-production process and also how do you sort of keep the energy up if the person you’re interviewing is kind of either giving you, like, one-word answers or just not engaged at all?

John Wall 04:47
Yeah, that’s one thing that, for Marketing over Coffee, it’s not as much of a challenge as it is for other types of things. Right. I mean, the majority of people that I’m talking to are in the marketing field, and they’re probably responsible for selling or convincing people of stuff. So, if you’re able to land a CMO job, I’m not worried about you not filling 20 minutes to talk about your thing. In fact, it’s usually the opposite—it’s having to rein people in and get them to where they want to go. But another one is, yeah, that’s one of the great things about the day and age we’re living in here today.

John Wall 05:20
Whereas, pretty much any pitch that I get, I can usually go up to YouTube or LinkedIn or somewhere and watch some video of them, of what they’re doing, and I can hear how they sound and what they’re talking about, and if they have their act together or not. So, that’s great.

And so, yeah, you hit it with pre-production, right? There’s a ton of work that goes on behind the scenes, even just the fact of, like, I was going through a whole cycle this past week of one of the publishers that we’ve had a lot of authors on before they send me their pre-releases.

John Wall 05:48
I get this list of, like, okay, here’s all the books coming out from January to June from us in 2025. So I can go through and look at the authors and see who’s who and if they’re people that we’d be interested in talking to or not, and filtering them.

And so, there’s, it’s not too difficult when I have them on camera because, up at that point, there’s been enough filtering and understanding of what they’re going to be talking about. We can keep them on the beat, but that doesn’t change the fact that—yeah—I’ve got the full show notes.

In fact, this is like the first of the behind-the-scenes things that would give people a look at what this thing actually looks like so that they get an idea for what’s happening.

John Wall 06:26
So this is the basic show note template that we use. In fact, this was, I was talking to the CMO of Zappy, this company in Boston, Natalie Kelly is there. And these were the show notes that we had put together for this. And leading off, you give them the link to the StreamYard so that when they’re ready to talk they can get in there.

For a lot of CMOs, I’m talking with probably a PR agency or their own PR person, and sharing this up ahead of time gives them the opportunity to give us all the links to the books or social or LinkedIn, or whatever they’ve got.

And then from the story side, there’s the big idea. There’s always one big “what is the takeaway” from this episode? What are we trying to get out there? Then we get their approved bio.

John Wall 07:08
I start to get some points that I want to hit. I highlight and dig into. We make sure we have their headshot already approved and locked in before the show goes. And then it’s all about the rundown. Right? That’s the real, the meat of the prep is: if they’ve read a book, I’ve got all my book notes in here. If they’re talking about products, or whatever, that’s all in here.

And the show has a real structure, a three-act process to it. So, the shows run about anywhere from 24 to 30 minutes. The first act is setting up the subject. The character, who they are, what they do, what was their history that got them to where they are today? And then we have a 60-second sponsor spot. The second act is where we do all the heavy lifting. Right?

John Wall 07:52
That’s where we’ve introduced some concepts in the first act, and now we get right all the way down to tactics of how this stuff works and where it fits into what they’ve got going on. That usually gets us to, like, the 16 to 20-minute mark. There’s a second 60-second spot there for one of the sponsors.

And then we try to wind down in the last act. I mean, we’ll wrap up anything that we got into that was prickly in the second act. But the third act is talking to them a little more as a person, thinking about what they’re looking at in the future. We usually always let them recommend a book or movie or music or something that gets them a little bit more human out the door and then share links. Where to go.

John Wall 08:33
Natalie here, she’s got a book coming out in the fall through Kogan Page. We were talking about that. And then basic FAQ for the PR folks as far as what goes on and some sample copy for when we’re going to promote it.

But so, having that doc out there really gives everybody an idea of what topics are going to be hit and when. There’s no surprises for the guest. They’re able to prepare and give us notes.

And even a lot of times, once in a while, the PR people will say, “Hey, this is a topic we can’t go near because this is something that, whatever, there’s litigation, or they don’t like to talk about it, or whatever the deal is, or we can’t divulge.” That’s a big one with publicly traded companies. A lot of times I’ll be able to put things together.

John Wall 09:12
I’ll be like, “Okay, so it looks like you’re going here.” And they’re like, “Yeah, no, we can’t talk about that.” But that gets everybody on the right map.

Katie Robbert 09:20
Nice. And I know, having done a couple of episodes with you always, when you’re not interviewing people for Marketing over Coffee, whether it’s you and Chris, or me filling in for Chris, you sort of switch contexts, and you still have that three-act structure.

But it’s more about: here’s what’s happening in marketing, or here’s what’s happening, sort of, in the industry news. Let’s talk about those, get those opinions.

So I like how you have that balance with your show where it’s not only just, “I’m interviewing the person who just wrote a book,” but it’s also helping your audience keep track of: here’s what’s actually happening in the industry that you need to pay attention to.

Katie Robbert 10:00
Would you say it’s, sort of, like, a 50/50 balance of interviews and non-interviews, in terms of your episodes, or do you feel like you skew one way or the other?

John Wall 10:09
No. It tends to be about 50/50. Yeah, that’s kind of the idea. I mean, the big part is when I do the regular segments with, like, Chris—and where you fill in—that the beats are: the first segment is always the shiny object. It’s kind of the biggest news, whatever’s hot.

And then the second segment is more in-depth analysis. So, if there’s topics there that are interesting, but need more explanation and need to dig in.

And then the third? Yeah, again, we try and get to be a little bit more fun and engaging out the door. So, that’s gear watches over there, and we talk about music or other stuff that’s not directly marketing-related, but maybe memes or things that people do need to be aware of. It’s just, it’s not the serious business stuff.

John Wall 10:51
Yeah, that, yeah. And there’s a lot of—people far smarter than me in this kind of stuff have done a lot of research—as far as, by keeping in those kind of, like, three, eight-minute segments. You’re not burning. You’re not reaching cognitive overload.

Like, people are not getting bored or starting to lose the thread or understand it, and it’s just enough to keep them engaged. And the real goal is for them to—when they close out at the 25 minutes, or whatever—say, “God, that went quick.” You never want anybody that’s like, “Okay, when is this going, when is it going to end?” You want them to be looking forward to the next one because they’re, at no point, too slow down.

Katie Robbert 11:31
Do you feel like there’s—I know there’s a lot of podcasts that will go on for, like, an hour, 90 minutes—like, what is it about the, sort of, 20 to 25-minute mark that you think works really well for a podcast?

John Wall 11:45
Yeah, that’s, from the academic side, we kind of know that people can go from, like, 45 to an hour or so, and they may fade in and out of there. But if it’s something that they want to learn about, they’re going to stick in with that.

Once you get beyond an hour, then it starts to get weird because then it’s, kind of, like, a lot of times, people are breaking into chunks. They’ll listen for 30 minutes and another 30, and go. And, yeah, the thought, always, for us has just been, there’s so many other podcasts out there. There’s so much stuff. If you’re always in that quick bite that people can fit in anywhere, they will fit it in anywhere.

John Wall 12:22
And when time comes for them to start throwing some podcasts off the list, well, that one, that’s three hours a week. That’s an easy call if it’s not entertaining them.

Katie Robbert 12:32
So we would be remiss if we didn’t talk a little bit about gear. And when I started working with you, I learned a lot about having the proper gear. And now I feel like, with the resurgence of podcasts—around the time of 2020, when people couldn’t leave their homes, like, “Oh, what do I do? I know, I’ll start a podcast”—gear became much more readily available, if that makes sense. So, it’s not that the microphones and the audio didn’t exist before, but the makers of those things, I think, saw a market that was new to podcasting. And so I feel like they made discount versions, or things like packages, like podcast starter kits.

Katie Robbert 13:18
So what are the basic things that, if I were to start a podcast tomorrow, what are the—half a dozen things—I should have gear-wise?

John Wall 13:30
Yeah, and you hit the point with that, is that the gear has been changing and morphing the entire time that we’ve been doing this. And lockdown was huge. Not only—I mean, podcasting did surge, and there was a great increase—but the whole transfer to Zoom culture worked for everybody.

People started to realize that, “Okay, I need a decent camera, I need the ability to share my screen, I need to learn how to use screen-sharing software.” So, that completely accelerated everything because, when we had started out, it was far easier to sit together in person, in the same room, and record, and then use the audio editing tools.

John Wall 14:04
And it’s gone to the complete other end of the spectrum now, where it’s easier for us to do virtual than it is to try and get together in a space—you can just get the same kind of sound.

So, yeah, there’s, and, as we had promised with the rundown for the show, there’s two basic sides to it. Right? It’s software and hardware. And so for the software stack, actually, I…this is. Let’s see if I get trapped in a loop here. I think we can do this, though.

Like this has worked in the past. I should be able to show. Well, maybe not. We’ll see if it freaks out. Here we go. Okay. Yeah. Where you’re getting the infinite window. But this is the best tool right here is StreamYard. Right? Because you can see we have this working tool.

John Wall 14:40
If we got three cameras, we’ve got a background. All this stuff is there and working. And it is a little bit freaky. I’m going to get that out of there.

But StreamYard is the best tool for us. And there are other tools that do this kind of online meeting thing. But the biggest thing that has worked here is that they have the best caching and content network for video.

There’s a couple of other services, like I do have to give a shout-out for some of the other. I’m trying to remember off the top of my head, like, we used to use Zencastr, we used to use the guys out of the West Coast. Oh, they’re going to kill me because I can’t remember the name off the top of my head. It’s been so long. We’ve been on StreamYard for over a year.

John Wall 15:19
There’s other ones that do a little bit better job with the audio, actually, and there’s other ones that do a better job of if you want to have, like, six or eight people in the room. But the thing, for us, it just came down to video lag.

All those features are cool, but if your video lags, at some point, that kills the whole thing. And StreamYard has proved itself to be the best at not lagging on video.

So, yeah, that’s the first chunk of the software here is that we get in on this. We’re able to, kind of, do the whole video production thing. And then, beyond podcasting too, if you want to be streaming on LinkedIn and Twitter and Twitch, it can do all those things at the same time.

John Wall 15:56
So you kind of kill a bunch of birds with one stone there as far as getting the audio recording. And so, yeah, I pull the audio recording from here. And then the other big software tool for me is, I’m in the full Adobe suite. So once I jump from there, it goes over to Audition.

Let’s see, of the 67,000 windows, this is the normal window that I have running for that. It’s, for anybody that’s worked with a non-linear editor, you just look at this and you totally get what’s going on.

I have myself on Track One. The guest is on Track Two. Here, I’m playing around on Tracks Four and Five with other recordings. It’s neat in that I’ve got StreamYard recording myself, but I also have a hardware device here, and I’m going to show that off. We’ll talk about that, too.

John Wall 16:44
But so I can get in there and have a local recording besides the recording that’s up there. And so, yeah, Audition is the tool of choice for me just because we use Audition.

And then when it comes to editing the blog post, I use Dreamweaver. When I’m doing the show images, I’m using Photoshop. And that’s all Adobe. And so you pay one price, and you get all that stuff. So, that works well for us also in the stack for that.

Okay. Yes. So the first tip I was going to throw out there is plug-ins for Audition. I use Sound Soap. That’s the secret weapon for the show is that it does two different things.

John Wall 17:24
It has the ability to—if you have a guest that has a fan or air conditioner or washing machine, or whatever, some kind of weird background noise—it can pull that out.

I mean, you can do that in Audition, but it’s, kind of, challenging with sound stuff. You just click one button. You’re like, “Okay, kill the noise.” And it does kill the noise.

And I didn’t think about that is an AI tool that has been using this long before the craze because there’s insane stories about that. That piece of software actually disappeared for a couple of years because the founders gotten some kind of litigation, and word never got out as to what exactly happened, but it, sort of, disappeared for, like, a year and a half, and it’s back and back to normal now.

John Wall 18:03
But besides killing the noise, it also just has a sparkle button that you click on, and it just makes your voice a little bit more radio. A little bit more impactful and a little bit just—I call it shiny, and then they call it shiny because it’s what it does.

So, yeah, it’s $99 to plug it in and make that work. And that can, especially if you get in a situation where, your guest, for some reason, was next to the railroad tracks, or some insanity, you can salvage audio and get some stuff back. That was horrible. So that’s. Oh, go ahead.

Katie Robbert 18:37
Oh, I was going to say, and I want to ask a little bit more about the audio because I know you’re talking about software. And the hardware for audio is just as important. And I’m, sort of, personally blown away by the amount of people who still use their computer speakers or just use their headphone speakers for recording audio. And it always sounds kind of tinny.

Now, I know this is going to be getting a little bit in the weeds, but I think it’s an important thing to note, especially depending on how you’re recording your podcast. So there’s a lot of different kinds of microphones. There’s a lot of things that pick up audio.

Katie Robbert 19:16
So one of the trends that I see is, as everybody’s starting their own podcast, you have the hosts, there’s a video recording, the host sitting around, like, in the same room holding the microphones in front of their face. And my first thought is, “Well, they certainly don’t know enough about microphones to pick the right ones.” So, somebody on the production team picked the microphones that only pick up sound from a single direction, and they have them set up in a certain way.

So can you speak to us a little bit about the microphone choice, for example? So you can see my microphone on the screen. I speak into it from the side. I can’t have this microphone, like, the top over here facing me because it won’t actually pick up the sound.

Katie Robbert 20:02
And I feel like that’s a mistake that a lot of novice podcasters, or content creators do, is they pick the wrong mic and/or they don’t know how to set it up correctly, or they’re relying on their iPods, which, for regular meetings is fine, but for audio production is really. There’s no excuse for it.

John Wall 20:23
Yeah, no, you brought us some fantastic points there. So that’s a huge one is what you talked about, is that side address. Right? That’s what you have is called the side address. You talk into the side of the microphone.

Everybody thinks you, on all microphones, you talk into the top, and that’s not the case. And there’s really nothing that hits me better than when I get a pitch from somebody telling me about their awesome podcast, and I see them with a picture, talking into the top of a side-address microphone. You’re like, “Yeah, no, dude, you don’t know what you’re doing. You’re lying.” And that does happen all the time.

And on the other side of the coin with that, it is amazing.

John Wall 20:56
The shine you’ll see in your eyes when you tell them, “No, why don’t you talk toward the logo there on the side?” And they hear the sound, and they’re like, “Oh my God, this microphone really is great.” And they finally get there.

Yeah, well, actually, so this is the other here. This is the other. I was glad that we’re doing this because this is a skillset that I used to use all the time, and I rarely use anybody. Here’s the whole rig behind the scenes.

And, as you can see, I’ve got—this is the—I have to get all the names and models. So, I use the Shure MV7, which is Shure’s radio mic, but it’s USB. It’s actually made to four computing. The other Shure microphone that’s hugely popular is the SM7B. And that’s, like, a $400 mic.

John Wall 21:41
And it only has the big XLR wire connector.

Katie Robbert 21:45
Yeah, mine has an XLR. If you can see my screen, I have this big blue. I have a Marantz.

John Wall 21:53
You’re on Marantz? Yeah, that’s.

Katie Robbert 21:54
Yeah. I have a Marantz. It’s less expensive than a Shure.

John Wall 21:59
Yeah, no, that’s a. That is fantastic. Mike Marantz’s gear is, like, from the ’60s and ’50s. Even has a huge, rich tradition.

Katie Robbert 22:06
I love this legit behind-the-scenes look at what’s going on.

John Wall 22:09
I know what’s really happening. And so I love this. This is the big magic right here is the Rode Procaster. I always get it wrong, it’s not the Rode protester, it’s the Rodecaster Pro II. And so this box is, like, $700. It’s not inexpensive.

But the thing is, this is just insane because I have, you’ve got the XLR in so you can have up to four microphones plugged into this thing, and you’ve got the super cool radio sliders that you can play with. Everybody loves to do that. And you’ve got the soundboard too.

So, if you want to fire music in, tunes, the Marketing over Coffee intro can drop, and I can serve that back down the line. But, yeah, this thing is huge. And then as far as other power that this provides.

John Wall 22:57
The big thing is that when you’ve got a, when you’re driving the microphone, this box is able to do compression and expansion. So the idea is, even if I have to move around a little bit and away from the mic, if my microphone technique is not dead-on, this will actually amplify or clamp down on the sound to keep it at a consistent level.

So, that’s a huge win, because that’s the kind of stuff that a lot of people do in post here.

I’m also, by the way, the Incredible Hulk Oalla water bottle, very popular.

Katie Robbert 23:27
Hydration is key, kids. Drink your water.

John Wall 23:29
It is. And the side holster will have a link to that in the show notes so folks can grab one of those as they go.

But compression expansion is big, and the other huge one is: this has a noise gate. And, in fact, you can actually see this, like, while I’m talking there on Channel One, right, you see the bar, but when I stop that’ll go to dead zero—like, a car just went, bye.

So, it’s programmed so that when the, when my voice comes on, it’s at a certain level, so it’s letting that signal go through. But when I’m not talking and it falls below a certain level, it just says, “Okay, drop that all the way to zero, then actually kill that channel.”

John Wall 24:08
So if there is a washing machine, air conditioner, fan, whatever, something running, you set that noise gate so that annoying sound is below the noise gate’s level. And so then when you’re not talking, it just turns that off, and you have dead silent silence on the channel. And so that, again, that’s another thing that makes post-production easier and cleanup easier.

Katie Robbert 24:29
I would assume that there’s also—and I can see that I’m on Channel Two, which is actually kind of cool, but you would imagine you need to have your different audio files on different channels—I would imagine there’s also, like, a quick-kill button, or we call it a kill button, but it’s a quick mute button.

So, like, if something happens and, rather than fumbling around on your screen to try to figure out how to mute, is there a button on that soundboard where you can just press it, and it mutes your mic immediately?

John Wall 24:57
Yeah. Right. So that’s the thing. So, I have on my Channel One, that red light, right when that goes, I’m gone. And so I can—and you totally nailed that.

See, that’s a great stealth move for, excuse me, for Zoom meetings and for hangouts, I can mute myself from here. And I. But on the meeting software, it still looks like the microphone’s on so nobody knows if I’m muting or hiding myself, or lurking.

I can control the audio from over here, and so that’s much better. It also has—the green button is interesting—that’s a solo button. So if you have, if something weird’s going on, like you’re getting some kind of weird buzz, you can go down the channels and say, “Okay, let me solo those.” So, when you hit that button, you’re only hearing that and not the other channels.

John Wall 25:38
And so if you have a weird buzz, you can just go down and say, “Okay, this is where the buzz is.” You can figure out who’s got the problem or echo too.

If you’re getting some weird echo, you can run down and do solos and see which one has it. Well, of course, the first easy move is to mute the channels. Run through and mute them all and figure out who’s who.

But, yeah, so this box is pretty good. And then, of course, it’s fully onboard recording. Right? I have a hot light there. And that’s a whole other thing too. Like, when I’m in Zoom meetings, I don’t have to have an extra attendee that tips off that we’re recording. Like, I just hit the record button over here and grab the files off of there when I’m done.

John Wall 26:13
And so that makes it much easier to know if I’m recording or not because God forbid you have one of those automated plug-ins, and it doesn’t fire, and you don’t have a recording. Like, you’re completely burned from that one.

Interesting thing too: this is, actually, this box is pretty old. It’s about three or four years in now. They do make the Duo, which is only two channels, and so it’s a significantly smaller box, too.

And that’s only $500. If I was really enterprising, I’d sell this on eBay and go get the $500.01. But I just can’t be, like, all production people. I’m like, “Okay, it works. Do not breathe on it. Don’t even look at it.”

Katie Robbert 26:50
Don’t jiggle the wires, my God.

John Wall 26:52
Don’t let anything go. Another one too, I was going to show off is this mic arm. This is cool. And that, this folds back and goes off the desk. So, when I’m not recording, it’s out of my way. So, that was a big one.

The other one, just for a second too. Not to make people sick, but the Plexiglas is an interesting thing. That’s a. It’s a plastic arm that I got to find a way to pause this, or, like, not make it so annoying when I’m talking about it. It’s in lieu of a teleprompter.

Right? I’m able to have that up there and talk straight into the camera, but still see stuff on my screen. So, I have my prompts and the show notes, and stuff, so I don’t lose my way.

John Wall 27:31
But it doesn’t look like I’m looking at the stuff down on my desk, or whatever.

Katie Robbert 27:35
But also your keyboard, my God.

John Wall 27:38
Oh, yeah. We’re going through the whole. This was all part of the thing too. We’ll go to this next. So, this is the workstation, right? The idea is if you’re going to be spending hours and hours doing this kind of stuff, you have to have a full-on workstation.

So, this desk stand is, it’s lower than my regular desk. Right? So, it’s the correct wrist height, and, yeah, the keyboard. So this is the Keyboardio Atreus, which is, you know, uber-geek keyboard. But the idea is, so it’s a broken keyboard. They call this, it’s a twisted side so I don’t have to force my wrist. Right. My natural hand position is actually straight.

Katie Robbert 28:07
On, and I was, I was just doing that over my keyboard.

John Wall 28:10
I was like, “It’s so crazy.” I mean, you’ll feel that too. You’re just, like, “Oh, yeah. Like, I’m, I feel that.” Carpal tunnel syndrome. Totally get me as I’m there.

So the broken keyboard is one thing, but then, yeah, I, of course, this thing goes uber-nerd in that—this is the Dvorak layout. It’s not the standard. They call it QWERTY, which is QWERTY. Right? But this is Dvorak. So I have all the main vowels right on the center row, big hand, and all the hottest consonants on the other side. And, yeah, I would not recommend doing this. That’s the ultimate.

Katie Robbert 28:44
Did you have to teach yourself how to retype?

John Wall 28:48
Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. So this was in, like, when did I do that? Like, 2005 or something like that. Like, a long time ago, I decided, because I had read all this stuff about, like, the world record typists that do, like, 140 words a minute, use this layout. This is the way they go.

And there is actually a crazy story behind that, is that the QWERTY layout is actually designed to be the slowest possible layout because, on typewriters, they don’t want the arms that hit the page to jam. And so they made it the worst possible layout that they could to slow type it down so the typewriters wouldn’t jam.

And, of course, we don’t have any of that problem right now. Like, we want top speed. So this is the optimized layout. But I never, I got, I’m, like, ten words faster.

John Wall 29:30
I used to be at, like, 80. I’m at, like, 90 now, or something like that. So, it is a little bit faster. And I do have to say, I don’t feel it in my fingers the same way. Like, it’s lessened headache.

But now the problem is, when I go sit down at a regular keyboard somewhere else, it’s not the same. And then this is either a benefit, or a feature, depending on how you look at it. But no one else in the house can use my computer either. They sit down, and they can’t figure out what the heck’s going on. And I, at least, this, because this is hardware, it is the right layout. But, for a lot of times, for years, I just had a regular keyboard. So, the keys weren’t actually what they said.

John Wall 30:04
I wasn’t looking at it so I didn’t need it, anyways. But you literally couldn’t type at all?

Katie Robbert 30:09
No. That looks like a nightmare to me.

John Wall 30:11
Yeah. Yeah. That is hell. But one thing about this style keyboard, this micro keyboard that is fantastic, is I have this “any” key here, and that actually activates the second layer. So, all of these keys have a second key underneath them. So, like, actually, this square, right here, of nine, that’s actually one to nine.

So, when I do numbers, I don’t have to move up to the number row. I just hold down the “any” key, and I can key the numbers I want, and the four directional cursor, and a bunch of the other top row number stuff that’s over on this side. So, I can actually cursor around, and all this stuff, without ever moving my hands. That’s the ultimate goal, is you take all the hand movement out of it, and so it just makes you faster all the way across the board.

Katie Robbert 30:52
I didn’t know what I was signing up for today when we said we’re going to do behind the scenes like that. Like, I have just this regular Bluetooth keyboard, a quiet keyboard now. Interesting. Similar to you, I have this mic arm that I can swing out of the way that’s always at the right height, and I just swing it out of the way when I’m not using it.

And similar to you, I also have, not attached to my desk, but I have this little—I don’t know what you call it—like, a lap desk that I put my keyboard, and it has, like, the fold-out for the mouse so that it’s at the right height versus at my desk. So, very similar to you. I have those things because I do enough.

Katie Robbert 31:38
We’re, sort of, going beyond podcasting, but, sort of, just the gear in general. If you’re going to be producing a lot of content, you want to make sure that you’re doing things in such a way that it’s not harmful to your—you know—your body. It’s ergonomically more structurally sound because you’re sitting at a computer for a long time now.

I do want to ask—because, like, you’re one of the things that I know was going around in, I don’t know if it was our community or someone else’s community, was the idea of using NotebookLM to, basically, actually, I think it was in our community. So, I can pull up the conversation—using NotebookLM to do podcast summaries and, basically, cloning somebody’s voice and have it, basically, you don’t even have to be there.

Katie Robbert 32:35
You don’t even have to be involved. You just have to give enough samples of your voice and somebody can have your voice, sort of, say anything, and it cuts down on the production.

So, as someone who professionally produces podcasts, what do you think about that? Like, is that something you would consider? Is that going to, sort of, change the way you do it? Is it going to be the end of Marketing over Coffee as we know it because AI is going to do it, and John Wall is going to be sitting on a beach while synthetic John Wall is doing Marketing over Coffee? Like, where? Where do we go from here?

John Wall 33:11
Yeah, yeah. It’s a great question. So a lot of the stuff that we’re talking about, I mean, I always view it as “Black Swan” stuff, but there is this interesting idea of, if you had the script, you could then put it in your voice without actually having to record it. That’s totally possible.

But the thing is, it’s a lot more work to sit down and write a script than it is to just sit and record the audio and do the podcast yourself.

One thing that is really cool with that is, not in my workflow yet, but I could totally see it becoming part of the workflow is: I do have problems a lot of times with a lot of the folks we talk to are doing really interesting stuff. But they’re not professional speakers, they’re not recording audiobooks.

John Wall 33:53
There’s a lot of times where I’ll get somebody that is just using, like, too many times. And there’s, sometimes they’re using that I have to leave it in because I can’t clean it up. Another word runs into the, like, and if I trim the “like” out, it’ll be obvious that I’ve made an edit, which is an absolute no-way.

And some of the latest tools now do have the ability where it’ll give you the transcript and you can actually rewrite it to make it more accurate or cleaner, and it will then put it back in their voice. And so that’s, kind of, cool.

I mean, it is, theoretically, you’re messing with their brand and their voice. But, of course, for everything I’d be doing it for, it would be making them sound better, cleaning up flubs, and things like that.

John Wall 34:37
Because sometimes too, people get excited and they start running. And it’s like when you run a transcript of that, it doesn’t even make sense. Like, when you’re listening, it makes more sense.

But the ability to do cleanup on the fly, I don’t see any easy way to do. You know, you see it used for weather reports, newscasts, sports reporting, all that stuff. You can just have a print-out of what’s going on, put it in a voice, and make a podcast out of it. But the stuff we do is, kind of, exploring ideas and more dynamic, actually not going to save you much time in the long run.

Katie Robbert 35:09
Well, and I like that you brought that up because I was going to ask is: are there specific use cases?

So, as the conversation was happening in the Slack group—which, if you want to participate, it’s trustinsights.ai, analytics, for marketers. It’s our free Slack community. You can join. You don’t have to pay anything. Totally free.—the conversation was around someone saying that the CEO that they work with is great with the written word, but they refuse to do audio and video content.

So, I can see the use case of using something like a NotebookLM and the AI synthetic voice of the person to create the audio content if that person isn’t comfortable doing that.

Katie Robbert 35:56
But I think you’re absolutely right in the use case where it’s more of an interview, and you can have the questions written ahead of time, but writing the answers ahead of time and then recording it, you could just do the AI version. But I feel like, even today, you and I, we knew we’re going to go in doing behind-the-scenes stuff. I knew the kind of questions that I was going to ask, but I feel like this particular episode has taken a lot of interesting twists and turns that we wouldn’t have gotten had we just stuck to, “Okay, here’s the script, here’s the questions, here’s the answers.” AI can do it. Like, I feel like you’re going to lose some of that humanness, some of that. I like the tangents.

Katie Robbert 36:44
I like when people, sort of, go off a little bit because that’s where you can see, like, the critical thinking is happening, the ideas are happening, and you don’t want to lose that.

And so I’m glad we brought up that aspect of it because I can see a lot of people are going to be like, “Well, I can just use AI to build a podcast. I don’t even need to be there.” But everything has to be so planned out, and you definitely, definitely don’t want to leave it to AI to just make it up.

John Wall 37:11
Yeah, right. You can get hallucination city going crazy. But, yeah, you hit the key point there is that it actually generates more empathy because you don’t realize what’s coming next. So you are actively surprised by some of the things you see, or it takes you in a new direction. And that’s the same thing that happens to the listener. Right?

Because they’re not expecting what’s coming to them, and it’s all new to them as they’re hearing it the first time. So now the host and the listener are—they’re paired and identified, and they’re in the same role—which gives them a common experience, helps get the message across, and makes it more of, it’s more of an experience. It’s not, you’re not just studying or learning. You’re actually, kind of, going through an adventure.

Katie Robbert 37:52
Have you ever had, and you don’t have to name names unless you really want to. Have you ever had a guest on your show that when the interview was done, in your mind, you’re like, “This is awful. I don’t want to even put this out.”

Like, have you ever just been like, “Oops, everything got deleted. I don’t know how that happened. I guess we can’t publish your episode.”

Like, have you ever had someone—because I know we talk about how to keep the interview engaging, and you mentioned, like, a lot of the people are people who are used to talking, used to giving information—but have you ever had your very special episode of Marketing over Coffee that you just were not proud of?

John Wall 38:29
Yeah. I fall back always to Seth Godin’s statement on that, is that, half your work is below average.

Katie Robbert 38:36
I.

John Wall 38:36
That’s just the way the world works. And so, yeah, there’s, there’s plenty of shows where I’m like, “I wish something more interesting happened that week,” or, “I wish this person knew what the heck was going on.”

The. Yeah, like I said, I can’t name names. But the worst one is, we see this sometimes, it has happened more than once, where, an executive has, quote, “written a book,” and then when you’re interviewing, it’s obvious that they did not write this. Somebody in the PR team, or did it, or they ghosted it or whatever. And that can even be okay. That can be salvaged if they can talk intelligently about it. But the worst thing is if I’m like, “Well, you talk about the seven points for X.” And they’re like, “Well, actually, we’ve changed this.”

John Wall 39:14
“It’s the five points of Y.” And it’s like, “Yeah, no, it’s not. But you didn’t write the book.” I get that. So, yeah, those are the worst ones.

But I am in kind of an interesting spot because it’s weird how we’re part of the community, and so all of the guests are also in the audience. And so I really can’t get myself into a position where I’ve not had a situation where we’ve recorded something, and then I’ve said, “Oh, that’s so horrible. Like, we have to throw that in the trash. You know, like, you have to vanish.” And that’s a practicality too. Like, I just don’t have the time to throw to.

And that was an eye-opener for me, though, as far as, like, what happens on the bigger shows.

John Wall 39:52
Okay. So, like, NPR, a big show like This American Life, they’ll go out and start building 12 shows and recording, and maybe four or five of them make it to see the light of day on the radio. You know, there’s a huge pile of shows where they work—for God, some of them, they’ll even work for months or years—and they’ll just be like, “Yeah, this just never goes anywhere. It doesn’t resolve, or it’s just not that interesting,” and it ends up in the trash can. And, yeah, and that is, that’s another thing that Tom Webster will get into too of, like, you know, you can’t have this mindset of, like, “Whatever we record, we’ll just throw it out there.” Like, you have to have a through-line to it.

John Wall 40:27
And it’s got to go somewhere because listeners are not just going to listen to something because it was 7:00 a.m., and you had to publish it. It’s like, you’ve got to have more of a plan than that.

Katie Robbert 40:38
I saw that post on Threads, these, “It’s 7:00 a.m. Doesn’t matter what the quality, it’s got to go out, anyway.” And I also saw Tom respond to it not so nicely, which I totally understand. Like, there’s something to be said for consistency, but you also need to have the quality to go with that.

John Wall 40:57
Yeah, it’s an interesting area because, for some people, there’s people who, like, if they don’t have a deadline, they just never do anything. And so for those people, yeah, it’s like, “Okay, make sure you write something by 7:00 a.m.” But, yeah, and Tom’s huge thing is: that doesn’t mean you have to share it to the world. Like, yeah, have your deadline of having it done by 7:00 a.m. every day, but then the next day go listen to it and say, “Hey, is this willing to, be shared? Is it worth doing?”

Katie Robbert 41:21
So, last question for you, or, I mean, I never run out of questions for you, but, like, last question for today’s livestream: how do you avoid—so, you know, we’re talking about, you know, podcasts in the marketing industry. There’s a lot of podcasts in the marketing industry—how do you avoid the sameness?

Like, so if, I’ll just use myself an example. If I’m a guest on your show, and then I’m a guest on someone else’s show, and I’ve just written a book, there’s going to be a lot of overlap of the questions, like, “Oh, so you just wrote a book. Tell me what it’s about.”

You know, how do you break through that sameness? I know, and I feel like that’s a really big question. But, for people who are like, “Yeah, that’s a problem I have.”

Katie Robbert 42:12
So, walk us through a little bit of behind the scenes of your thinking. You, John Wall, the host of Marketing over Coffee: how to break out of some of that sameness.

John Wall 42:20
Yeah, well, you hit a great point. And that you do have to have an angle. I mean, there’s some—it usually ties to your audience, of course, like that’s part of it, right?

Like, even though the author is doing these ten podcasts, he’s talking to ten different groups of people, so they’re, kind of, okay with that.

But, yeah, they definitely get into a groove of, like, “Okay, here’s the first five questions that I normally get answered,” and you can totally see that they’re on autopilot. You know, they’ve got their tropes all lined up, and they’re hitting it.

And I don’t know. That is one thing that has always been the philosophy of the show that I’ve always stuck with.

John Wall 42:49
I always say, “We start at the last page of the book, that when the author shows up, we’ve read the whole book, and we know what all the key points are, and can talk intelligently about them.” And the thing that people miss is that, for a lot of these authors, like that book’s been done for a year. They’ve been out speaking about it, and they’ve progressed beyond, even, what they’ve written, and they’re into the new stuff.

So, yeah, that’s one thing where I always get guests that love to come on the show and are excited about it because they get to talk about what’s happened since they wrote the book, and how their thinking has progressed. And we don’t have to take the first 15 minutes setting up, like, “Okay, what was Chapter One about, and what are these key ideas?”

John Wall 43:27
We can, kind of, jump ahead, and it does work for our audience because they’re all marketing tech people. We don’t have to spend time talking about the chasm, or talking about product-market fit, what that is. Our listeners get all that stuff. And so we can start with the, kind of, more exciting, interesting stuff at the end.

And I think that’s what a lot of the guests say they love. And a lot of the interview subjects love coming back because we can, kind of, touch on what they’re working on and talk about where they’ve been and where they’re going. Yeah, it makes a little better story.

Katie Robbert 43:58
Yeah, I’m sure answering the, “Oh, so tell me about the five P’s. What’s it about? Tell me about the book. How do you implement it?” Like, I know for me—and I don’t even do that many podcasts—but, you know, if you want me on your podcast, you can reach out. Trust Insights AI contact. Happy to be a guest. There’s a lot of sameness in those questions, and there’s, you can tell the interviewee fatigue when they’re like, “I’ve answered this question ten times, but, okay, let me recite the script.” And it does come across as very cardboard.

And so the thing that I really do like and respect about Marketing over Coffee is that you don’t have that. You’re not following the same playbook that every other podcast is, like, starting, like, “Okay. Like, you have to do the basics.”

Katie Robbert 44:43
“Like, tell me about the book. Tell me who you are.” But then you, to your point, immediately move beyond that. You go to the last page. You go to what’s next. You acknowledge the thing that everybody knows about this person, but then you really, you know, dig deeper.

And then the other thing I really like is that you do ask, you know, like, “What are you watching? Like, what are the TV shows?” Because I think that no matter how big the name, the celebrity, like, what it is, there are still humans. They still watch, you know, Cutthroat Kitchen, or the Great British Bake Off, or what. Like, they still have those human tendencies. And so I really love that angle of it as well, is that you bring it back to, like, “Okay, and now you’re human.”

Katie Robbert 45:25
“What do you do in your free time?”

John Wall 45:27
Yeah, that isn’t, that’s a lot of fun. Well, and you’ve run with that with Punch Out, you know, doing that cast as far as, like, digging because. Yeah, isn’t it? It’s amazing. As marketers, we, kind of, think we’re all the same because we’re working on the same stuff. But then you find out some of the hobbies that people have. You’re like, “Wow, that’s amazing.”

I, in fact, I’m sorry, I’ve been dying here. This is, like, both allergies and back-to-school are telling me, but I was talking to a guy who does podcast interview bookings, and because we had been talking about that yesterday, as far as vendors that do that, and the guy who runs the company is like, “Oh, okay. Yeah, I’m actually doing a trek through Spain. I’m on mile 400 of 450, but my assistant will help you out.”

John Wall 46:05
And I was like, “Wow, I thought you just hung out in Michigan and fished.” This is pretty crazy.

Katie Robbert 46:11
Well, and so, as John mentioned, Punch Out. So that is actually a separate podcast that I host, and we’re getting close to releasing a new season. So, the podcast is Punch Out with Katie and Carrie. I co-host the podcast with the fabulous Carrie Gorgone, and we, basically, talk about everything except work.

So, that was one of the things that. So, it was, sort of, a passion project for Carrie is, she hosted and still hosts a lot of podcasts for—throughout her career, depending on the company—she’s a really good showrunner, but she always runs out of time during the course of the podcast, and somebody will drop this, like, really interesting nugget about their life. Like that.

Like, you know, “I’m on mile 400 of 450 of my trek through Peru,” or whatever it is.

Katie Robbert 46:59
And she’s like, “But I want to explore that. I want to think about that more. I want to hear more about it.” And when you’re doing a show like Marketing over Coffee, that’s not the point of the show. People aren’t showing up to hear that. But it is interesting. So, she conceptualized and created Punch Out, which she and I co-host. And we bring on people like John Wall, and say, like, “What do you do in your free time?” And we really try. It’s interesting. People are like, “Well, I’m not that interesting. I don’t have any hobbies.” And that’s just not true. Everybody’s interesting.

So, John, I remember your episode, and we talked about the famous “chicken in the toilet” story.

John Wall 47:39
God, I’m trying to think if that’s been beaten. Yeah, a tenant in an apartment who—tried to flush a chicken carcass down a toilet—that was a complete disaster on a number of fronts.

Oh, yeah. I’ll have to come back at some point because, yeah, I’ve learned the four levels of hoarding now. There are actually four levels of hoarding, and we had a full-on Level Three hoarding and a person in an apartment. And, yeah, that was a three-week quest.

So, yeah, if you ever wanted to do extreme home makeover cleanup, we can talk more about that. And, yeah, it is.

John Wall 48:18
It’s just amazing how it’s not just the nine-to-five, people have these lives outside, and it’s amazing if you just scratch a little bit what they’re getting into, or where they’re going, you can find all kinds of amazing stories.

Katie Robbert 48:28
Well, and what I have found in my limited experience, compared to yours in terms of being an interviewer, is: giving people the space to be human actually creates a better interview experience overall because it makes them a little bit more comfortable. You can talk a little bit more freely, but you can still get to the big points.

And so I remember, I don’t remember exactly which guest it was, but one of our guests, who was a big name in the marketing industry, and has, like, all of this clout and wrote a book, and everybody knows them, they have this like—and, you know, in the show notes, I didn’t know what it was going in, but it just said, “precious moments.” And I was like, “Huh, I wonder what that’s going to be?”

Katie Robbert 49:09
They have this really big, weird, creepy collection of the Precious Moments figurines.

John Wall 49:15
Figurines, yeah.

Katie Robbert 49:16
If you don’t know what they are, please Google it. Like, and it just, it was so off-brand what people knew about this woman professionally. But she was, like, happy to talk about it because it was a big part of her life outside of work. And once we got her to open up, and give her the space to, sort of, speak to that in a non-judgmental way, she was, like, a great interview because she was like, “I love talking about this” because you, sort of, tap into that passion side of things that people are really excited about.

Katie Robbert 49:46
And so, you know, one pro tip that I would give people who are doing these business podcasts is: make time pre-show to ask some of those human questions to really, sort of, get people comfortable, warmed up, talking about themselves.

You know, something, you know, ask them, to John’s point, like, ask them, “What are they watching? What are they listening to?” But really don’t ask just for the sake of asking. Ask because you’re genuinely curious. So, find your version of that question.

John Wall 50:19
Yeah, warm-up is great. You know, anything you can do to get them talking. And, yeah, I always joke that it doesn’t matter. You can take any hobby and make it sound like the people who do it are, absolutely, completely off their rocker.

Like, it doesn’t matter what it is. You know, if you like golf, you’re like, “So wait a minute. You use, a stick to knock a ball in a hole 500 yards away, and you spend half your weekend doing that. Is this true?”

And the same, you know, collecting weird, small porcelain figures. Like, “You don’t find that creepy?” That’s not.

But, yeah, you can’t judge anyone’s hobby because they’re all ridiculous.

Katie Robbert 50:53
Well, and so we’ve gone a little long, but I feel like this is, John, whenever you and I sit down and do a live stream about podcasting, we never run out of things to talk about.

So, we might have to come back and, sort of, keep exploring this. But any final thoughts for people who want to know more about behind the scenes? I can give a plug for marketingovercoffee.com. It’s an 18-year-old podcast, which means that—and I say this with love and respect, because it means that you’ve been able to stick through all of the trends, the highs and lows—and people still keep coming back because you’re producing such really high-quality content.

John Wall 51:33
Thanks. Yeah. I appreciate that. And I’ve just, we’ve loved it over the years. It’s like we are doing all this stuff, and we love all this stuff. We’re geeks when it comes to hardware and everything. And so to have people that talk about this stuff, that appreciate it.

Yeah, it spares me all those embarrassing discussions at Thanksgiving because my family could not give a damn about any of this stuff.

Katie Robbert 51:51
Any final thoughts?

John Wall 51:53
Go out there, make something. Start some trouble. If you have any questions about audio stuff, definitely follow us. Go hit us up in the Analytics for Marketers Slack group. We’re over there. If, for some reason, you don’t use Slack, you can always find me on all the other social channels. Just look for Marketing over Coffee, you’ll find us.

But, yeah, always love to talk about this kind of stuff and happy to help if you have any questions.

Katie Robbert 52:13
All right. Well, thanks, John. I enjoyed it.

John Wall 52:15
Oh, thank you. Always a pleasure. Thanks for watching today. Be sure to subscribe to our show, wherever you’re watching it. For more resources, and to learn more, check out the Trust Insights podcast at TrustInsights.ai/tipodcast, and a weekly email newsletter at TrustInsights.ai/newsletter. Got questions about what you saw in today’s episode? Join our free Analytics for Marketers Slack Group at TrustInsights.ai/analyticsformarketers. See you next time.

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Trust Insights Podcast Transcript – Behind the Scenes of Marketing over Coffee

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