200th Episode Special

Blair and David reminisce about their podcasting journey since Blair first pitched the 2Bobs idea to David back in 2016, sharing what they've learned along the way, and what they might like to try with the podcast in the future.

Transcript

Blair Enns: David, can you believe this is the 200th episode of the 2Bobs Podcast?

David C. Baker: I can't. I wasn't sure we'd make it to 100. It just seems like such a long time ago when we were planning to do this, your crazy idea. I can't believe it's 200. It's taken on a life of its own, hasn't it? It's almost like we started this thing and now the podcast is dragging our lives around with it. It's bigger than we are.

[laughter]

Blair: Let's talk about that. We thought we'd do a little trip down memory lane. We'll try to keep some benefit to the listener in this. Talk about what we've learned, what you might learn, whether or not it might make sense for you to get into podcasting at this point, but this is one for you and me. It's our 200th episode after action review. We started recording, I think it was late 2015. The first episode dropped in early 2017. We're recording this in August of 2024. That's a lot of numbers.

It's been on air for seven-years-plus, if my math is correct. We've been recording it for over eight years. When we decided, "There's something good enough to launch a few episodes," we did say to each other, we would go to 50. I guess that was two years.

David: Two years worth, right, every two weeks.

Blair: We'd go to 50, then we would make the call. Then at 50 we decided, "Let's go to a hundred." We checked in-- I think we did a podcast after action review somewhere around episode 72 or 74, but I don't think we checked in at 100 to see if we wanted to keep going. Here we are.

David: We were engaged when we crossed a hundred.

Blair: Let's talk about where we are now. Are we engaged? Does it make sense to keep going past 200?

David: Oh, I am more engaged than I ever have been. I don't even know why you picked a hundred. That wasn't me just to clarify. I thought, "Okay." The whole idea of the podcast was yours too. Something happened to me. I don't know if it was just my own mental something or business influences or what, but I've also taken my cue from you. If you are engaged, I am really engaged. If I sense that you're losing it, then I feel like I can't carry it by myself. I don't feel that strong to do it.

To answer your question, I am more engaged now than I ever have been. I have never come close to not being able to come up with a topic. I'll come close every once in a while and say, "Oh gosh, I got to come up with a topic." There might be a time pressure thing, but I could list a hundred things we could talk about still.

Blair: What's your measure of my sense of engagement these days?

David: It's the highest it's ever been.

Blair: Really?

David: Yes.

Blair: Then we'll keep going.

[laughter]

David: There's a decision. I can tell because of how excited you are about a topic. You'll tell me, a couple of weeks in advance, "Hey, I'm going to talk about this next." Then you start thinking about it. I can also tell by the level of energy you bring to it. Of course, that has something to do with whether you texted me a few minutes before we start and say, "Hey, I need to go grab a coffee. I'll be 10 minutes late."

[laughter]

Blair: Let's have the airing of the grievances now. There's the coffee, there's the audio equipment failures. Let's come back to are there things that we might change about this? Let's talk a little bit about something you alluded to which is under the banner of production function, taking a note from Tyler Cowen's podcast. What's your production function? Basically, I'll post some questions to you and then I'll go ahead and share a little bit about how I do these things too.

Let's start with how you come up with a topic. Let's tie this also to the other content you create because you write a post weekly and then we record this biweekly. Ostensibly, I pick a topic, you interview me on that topic and then you pick a topic and I interview you on that topic. If you're using your blog posts as a source for content, then about one in four posts of yours and about one in two of mine, because I'm currently writing every two weeks, gets turned into a podcast. Is that how you think about it or do podcast episodes get turned into posts or what's the relationship between those two?

David: Some things that I write about don't seem really appropriate for a podcast topic for some reason. I would say half of the things that I write about would make a good podcast topic, but I haven't necessarily already written about them. I'll tell you what, and I don't know if this is odd or what, but it's just true. It's like all of my ideas for topics come when I'm in a conversation with a prospect or a client- -where something will just click and I'll madly scribble it on a whiteboard that I keep next to me and then after the call is done, I'll say, "Oh, that's a really good idea." Then I let it sit for about a week and then if it still seems like a good idea, and some of them don't. They're like those things you write when you're in your bed at night and you wonder like, "What in the heck was I thinking? That was not a good idea." Some of them are and then I'll say, "All right, Emily, can you do an illustration?"

Then it might sit in a folder for seven years or it may be the very next one. At the moment, for me, the idea comes up and then I decide, "Is this an article or is this a podcast episode?" Sometimes it's both, but it's always the idea that comes and those ideas always come when I'm talking with a client or a prospect. Then once I have the idea as a valid idea, then I start to notice things. It's like when you're driving down the Interstate and you bought a new car and now you see everybody else driving the same model, and you wouldn't have noticed that before. Or you're in an RV and it's like, "I didn't even notice how many RVs there were before."

Now I start noticing all the things that relate to that, an article I might read or a podcast I'm listening that somebody else does and then it just gets added to that outline, so to speak. Then I ignore it completely, I write my outline and then I go look at those articles that I've collected to see if I've missed something. Recently, I've been using an AI search engine too at the end of something to see if I missed something. That's my production function.

When I decide on a topic, I've already got a bunch of thinking on it, I just need to organize it. That's probably my favorite part. I know this isn't really part of your question, but my favorite part about doing 2Bobs is it is constantly forcing me to develop a point of view on something and I just love that. It's like going to the gym. It forces me to do good things and it keeps my brain alive. That's what I love about it the most.

Blair: I identify with all of what you said. I'm curious about the distinction between podcast content and blog post content. You've already said some of it doesn't really translate to a podcast medium for whatever reason. As an example, here's how I do it. Like you, I'll be talking to a client or I'll be writing something else. Then the ideas come up and I drop them into Evernote as future topics. I'm thinking first and foremost as a blog post. I'm thinking, "I'll write a post on this."

Then I do a very cursory outline of just the key bullet points of the idea or the topic. Then my intent is to write a blog post, publish the blog post, and then we will have a conversation about it. Every second or so blog post then gets turned into a podcast episode. What I've noticed lately over the last year or so is I make the outline and then I'm more likely to record the podcast first and then write the blog post second. If the listener is interested enough, they could go back and do a comparison between the conversation we're having on a topic and what I've written on the topic.

The pattern that seems to be emerging for me is you and I have a conversation about a topic before I've written deeply on it. I've only written superficially. I've done an outline. Then I use that conversation to refine the blog post. I don't know why it's happening this way. I don't know that it's going to continue to happen this way because it's basically a reversal from how I've previously worked. I'm not sure it's better this way. It's just something that seems to have happened. My need for variety, maybe.

David: That's interesting. The reason some of the topics I come up with are not really great for a podcast episode is because there's just not enough meat there sometimes. This is a 400-word article. I'm not sure there's enough to talk about sometimes or I just don't want you influencing me at all, so I just write the article so that I stay away from it. No, just kidding.

Blair: No, that's a valid point. I get that. How much work is it for you to prepare for a podcast? We schedule an hour for the recording. We probably use 45 or 50. We use a bunch of that to catch up at the beginning. Sometimes we talk so much, we end up not recording the podcast. We have to do it later. How much work is the preparation for you?

David: Probably 20 to 30 minutes, something like that. That's what it takes to put the outline together and think through it enough. How about you?

Blair: It depends how I'm thinking about it. If it's just the outline, yes, 20 to 30 minutes, maybe a little bit more. If I've already written the full blog post, it's almost no time. It's a quick review. Every once in a while, you and I will just share a link to a post that we've written and said, "Let's just use this." More often, we actually take- -that post and we distill it into a more concise outline that allows the other to navigate through the conversation.

David: When I send you an outline for an episode where you're going to interview me on a topic, what do you do with it when you get it from me?

Blair: Wrap fish with it.

[laughter]

David: Do you make notes or do you just read it?

Blair: Sometimes. I read it. Sometimes I'll go read the supporting post if you've written a post on it. Sometimes I make notes in it. I always make notes for myself somewhere. Sometimes they're actually in the document so you can see me in a Google Doc making notes, call-outs, highlighting things, or even sometimes reorganizing things. That's not so common. I'm almost always making written or typed notes separately on a piece of paper or on Evernote.

David: Do you think we disagree enough or is there too much mind melding in our approaches?

Blair: I think eventually our thinking on a topic coalesces. It's pretty rare where we would have a sustained conversation or talk about a topic for a sustained period of time where we don't come to agree on something. I can't think of any examples, but I think there have been some examples where you've put forward points of view on something where maybe I could have pushed back more, but I'm not sure that it's my job in that moment. Sometimes I feel like it's the appropriate thing to do and sometimes I feel like, "That's an interesting point of view. I'll let him put it forward."

David: Let him look stupid. Let him deal with it.

Blair: No, it's more like, "I'll have to think about this because you're causing me to rethink my own point of view." I'm not sure what the listener would prefer, for me to stop and challenge and push back on that or to let you put forward the point of view. If I flip that around, I wouldn't be able to tell you when to do what because I think there are times when I actually don't care what you think. I have a thesis I'm putting forward. It's not that I don't care what you think, but I want to put my full thesis forward without you picking apart every little piece of it.

Then there are times when, "No, let's go at it. Let's have a to and fro on this." I think we can both agree that there are topics that we've done where we look back and think, "I'd like to have that one over again." I don't think that way anymore. I don't believe that to be true anymore. I wouldn't follow that advice now. Maybe in those situations, we would have appreciated some pushback. What do you think?

David: I actually don't feel all that much pressure to be right. I don't want to be an asshole and just question everything at all. I just think that's just stupid and annoying. I really want to believe the stuff I say, but I don't feel like it needs to be fully tested. It's enough if it just gets somebody to think a little bit differently. The reason I ask that question about whether we agree too much or not enough is because I find myself in this very annoying situation of defending something you've said on a podcast.

Like I'm working with a client and they say, "On your podcast, you said that." I say, "No, I didn't say that. Blair said that." It's like, "What do you think of that?" That's not what this engagement is. This engagement is not to pull apart everything where there's just not quite exact overlap. It's just so funny. It's almost like I'm taking responsibility for the stuff you believe, and that's probably true in reverse too. It doesn't have to be that way. We can have very different perspectives on things.

Blair: It's interesting. The listener listens, a little bit of time goes by, and often they will attribute to the other person, the other person's ideas. You and I get this quite a bit. I saw something on LinkedIn the other day where somebody had quoted a Dan Sullivan quote that I cite often and had attributed it to Chris Doe and Chris replied and said, "That's not me. That's me quoting Blair." I replied and I said, "That's not me. That's me quoting Dan." We don't seem to parse that in our minds. The net takeaway is you and I have had a conversation. The subject was X. You and I must therefore both believe X. Maybe we do need to push back a little bit more on each other.

David: Do you remember when we first had the meeting? I think it was when I lived in Nashville. You were in town for some reason. It must have been a new business summit or something we were doing together and we had Marcus there. I remember the layout of the room. It was in my little low ceiling office. Had we already thought about doing a podcast and we wanted to talk about it or was that just some random idea that popped up? I don't remember.

Blair: I don't remember that meeting. I remember being in that office many times. I'm not sure I remember being there with Marcus, although I'm almost certainly was there many times because Marcus used to produce your events and then the events that you and I did together. I don't remember the origin of it other than me suggesting the idea and thinking that's a pretty good way for you and I to continue to have a conversation, just regular exchange. Why not just press record? I guess it turned into a little bit more than that. No, I don't remember the initial meeting. What do you remember about that?

David: I remember you suggesting it. Marcus had never done a podcast before and he was really excited about it. There was no learning curve for him. He knew exactly everything about audio editing so it was pretty easy for him. Then I remember one of the first things that happened is he recommended certain audio setups for us because he was a real stickler for the quality of it. In retrospect, yes, it was definitely your idea. I thought, "Oh, I'd love to do something with you. Let's do it." I wasn't even a podcast consumer at the point.

Blair: Are you now?

David: Oh, I am now. Yes. A really big one. I don't experiment a lot. I have six or seven that I listen to regularly. Why do we think this podcast is successful? By successful, I mean you and I, we can't have a new business conversation without somebody bringing it up, it seems like. Also, the feedback we get and the downloads are really good and they've been growing since the very beginning. Why is it successful? I'd like to think that it's because of the quality of it.

One thing that people say constantly every time I ask them about it, they always say the chemistry between us. I take that for granted, but they always say that. I think there's something else too. I want to mention this because otherwise people could misunderstand. The discoverability of podcast is really poor. The fact that you and I already had an email list of people who were getting our stuff so we could tell them, "Hey, you want to listen to a podcast? Here it is." That was why it took off.

Sometimes you have to just be honest with yourself. If you don't already have an engaged group of followers, it may very well make sense to do a podcast, but you have to be reasonable about how discoverable it will be. Sometimes you do it just because you learn a lot. Sometimes you do it just to connect with your prospective customers who wouldn't respond to an email, but they would respond to an invitation to be on your podcast and they are a good enough guest that it's not a sham sales thing. That's another good reason to do it. I do think when we launched this thing, podcasts were much newer than they are now. The world is pretty saturated with podcasts right now.

Blair: Most of those podcasts don't last. For example, a couple of years ago, I launched a second podcast with Leah Power from the ICA in Toronto and it was on a very niche topic. It was called 20%, The Marketing Procurement Podcast. We recorded one season, went into hiatus before recording the second season. Then during the hiatus, I said to Leah, "I think I've thrown as much of myself at this topic as I care to," as much as I really enjoyed that experience.

You can still find that podcast. It's got the little twilight or icon next to it that says this podcast. It's still there. You can still download it, but it's not being added to-- Maybe it's inactive is the term. I think it's far over 90% of the podcasts ever launched are inactive. If somebody says, "Hey, congratulations, you're in the top 50%." If you're in the top 10% of podcasts, that doesn't mean anything. It's a meaningless number because only 10% are still going.

If I look back, I don't consider that experiment, that one season of a podcast to be a failure at all. I loved the opportunity to interview other people. You and I don't do that here. We interview each other. Obviously we have a relationship stretching back over 20 years now, but it's another reason to do a podcast. I learned so much from that podcast, from interviewing people in the marketing procurement profession. It was a very legitimate reason to do a podcast. I got an incredible amount of value out of it, but I got all the value out of it that I wanted to get out of it.

I think there's lots of reasons to do a podcast. To your point though, you and I already have audiences, the marketing procurement podcast got a pretty good bump from my existing audience. You have to have a smash hit me doing something really interesting that really goes viral for you, for people to start discovering your podcast beyond your own marketing though.

David: Right. Absolutely. One advantage of a podcast is that you own it. Should we talk about our worst performing episodes?

Blair: Yes. What are they?

David: Oh, I love this because our very worst performing episode.

Blair: I saw your list. It's An Introduction to Blair Enns, isn't it?

[laughter]

David: Oh my God. This is just giving me so much joy.

Blair: That just tells you everybody knows who I am.

[laughter]

David: That's the very worst performing. Next is What Happens When You're Away. That was my topic. Apparently everybody was away or something. I don't know. Next was Paid Time Off Is Earned Time Off. I thought that was a really good concept. That was yours. Mea Culpa. What was that one about? I don't know. Then the fifth worst performing was an introduction to me, but it wasn't as bad as the introduction to you.

[laughter]

Blair: Paid Time Off Is Earned Time Off. Was that my topic?

David: That was you.

Blair: Was it?

David: Yes. The basic premise was you don't work in order to get time off, you have to take time off in order to earn time to work.

Blair: That's a good premise. Maybe it was poorly named. Maybe you came up with the name.

[laughter]

David: That's the other thing. If you want to talk about what we each do well and don't do well, you are so much better at naming these things. Actually, you're better at making fun of me for the way I named them.

[laughter]

Blair: Yes, I am.

David: What you're not good at is ever having all your gear ready when we're ready to start. I could show up five minutes late and you'd still be saying, "Hey, give me a minute. I need to reboot this."

Blair: Hey, in defense, a certain percentage of those are you trying to figure out your audio equipment too. Yours is all set up, but you'll show up and it won't be coming through the right mic, et cetera. In terms of actual hardware equipment set up not being done properly, yes, that's my thing.

David: What's the other thing you don't do well? Oh, you don't carry any of the load in promoting this shit on LinkedIn. It's like I'm the only guy that ever talks about our podcast. That's not really true, but I'm carrying the load of carrying this on LinkedIn. Are you going to come back to LinkedIn-

Blair: Yes.

David: -at some point?

Blair: Very, very soon. I'm going to rise like a phoenix on LinkedIn, not on Twitter. I never say never. I don't have a strong feeling about this, but Twitter hasn't done anything for me for a couple of years mentally, emotionally, business-wise.

David: You just checked out.

Blair: I've checked out.

David: How about best performing episodes?

Blair: What's number one?

David: I'm not sure if these are in order, but the top five for sure, if I discount the recent ones that haven't been around, because these are evergreen where people will listen to them years later. Designing Your Service Offerings, Five Levels of Pricing Success, Secrets Behind The Killer Proposal.

Blair: Original spoof episode.

David: Right. The Power of Process and 10 Set Pieces. Three or four of these are yours. That's pisses me off. Usually that is absolutely true. If you look at the broad context, your topics perform better than mine. Is that because sales and pricing are such hotter topics? You bring the beef and the sizzle to it and I'm making people eat their vegetables.

[laughter]

Blair: I think that's probably somewhat accurate. I'm bringing the cotton candy. Maybe it is beef and you are making people eat their vegetables. I think selling in particular is just such a universal-- As long as you don't call it selling, it's such a universally interesting or relevant topic.

David: Let me ask you another question. I listened to every episode, not right away, sometimes within a week or so. You listen to them, I think, too. What reactions do you have when you listen to the episodes themselves after they've been edited?

Blair: First of all, if I'm walking around the house doing something and listening to 2Bobs, I'll be laughing and my wife now knows that I'm not listening to a comedy podcast. I'm listening to us. I've admitted this before and it's like, I don't know. To me, it's a comedy show. The first thing I notice is my own energy level. There are some episodes where I am seriously over-caffeinated and there are some episodes where I need a shot, I need a B12 injection or something.

The variance in my own emotional level that I bring to it, it's really striking to me. I think I've reigned that in a bit over the last couple of years, but the first five years, it would be, my God, some of them were just night and day different energy-wise. The other thing is, you and I, after we record an episode, we sign off, then we each have a short pithy assessment of how it went. It'd be like, "I think that was pretty good." Or, "Marcus has got his work cut out for him on this one." Then after it airs, I'm almost always surprised, the ones that I'm bracing myself for, I'm thinking, "Oh, I don't even know if I want to listen to this." I listen to it. My reaction is almost always, "Wow, that's a lot better than I remember it being. Marcus did, in fact, work his magic." What do you experience when you listen back?

David: It's the same thing. I'm so impressed with how Marcus has edited these things. This is probably a bad admission, but when I'm listening to the episode after it's been published, I listen to you a lot more carefully than I am when we're recording because when we're recording, I'm trying to think about, "Where do I want to take this next and how do I weave this back into such and such?" It's a lot more work for me to interview you than it is to be interviewed. When I'm listening to the podcast after it's come out, I always hear things that I didn't hear because I was concentrating on something else. I am often pleasantly surprised. I'll text my wife or one of my kids and say, "Wow, that was a good episode." After we finish recording and sign off, I'll say something like, "I think that'll work," which basically means that was shit. Then when I listen to them, it's like, "No, I think this is good. This actually represents what I think or what you think."

Blair: At the time.

David: Right, until it changes three months from now. I just feel so much joy that this is going to help some people. I just feel so much contentment and gratitude that we get the chance to do this because I know that there are people listening and some of them are going to say, "How did you know I needed that topic right now?" Of course, it's just all pure chance, but people benefit from this. I listen mainly to comedy on SiriusXM and that's just to relax.

When I listen to certain topics of other podcasts I listen to, I'm so grateful. It opens up a world for me and I feel a real deep privilege to have the opportunity for people to be spending time listening. It's like, "Wow, that is such a commitment and it's such a statement that we need to treat really carefully." I admire the fact that you and I put a lot of effort into continuing to do this and it's not a chore anymore. It has been a chore at certain points, but I feel so good. I listen to the episodes and I think, "Oh man, that is great. I'm just so glad we did that."

Blair: Even the ones that don't age well, it's fine, it's part of the history. Hey, I wanted to ask you, you and I talked before, we always talk about what should we do differently? We talked about ads or sponsors or interviewing people. We've messed with the length a little bit. We're trying to keep them under 30 minutes, so we need to wrap this up. I think the last time we saw each other, and I don't remember where or when that was, but oh, I remember now, it was in Chicago, we talked about actually doing these live.

We experimented with this a few years ago where we used Riverside and we were on video, because you and I, we're not looking at each other when we record these things. We do audio only. We were on Riverside, and I think we even invited some people to sit in on the session as an experiment, but you and I agreed that we were going to use LinkedIn Live to actually record these things live so people could participate and maybe post questions afterwards or whatever, but just as a novelty, as an experiment.

Then we would still hand the local audio files over to Marcus, and he would work his magic and edit together the usual episode that people hear, and that's what they would download in their podcast feed, but maybe it was on me. I got distracted by other things. Is that an experiment you still want to do?

David: Yes, I would. That wasn't a full-throated excitement, but I would like to try it. We'd have to stick to a very specific schedule, which if we just did it as an experiment, that would be easy, but I don't like the idea of having to wrap my schedule around a weekly appearance or every two-week appearance on LinkedIn and then I can't travel on that day or something. I think the idea is really worth pursuing somehow, even if it's just occasional, and say, "Hey, tomorrow we're going to do such and such." I think we probably should do that.

Blair: We know at least a day in advance when we're going to record. We have recording dates set out weeks in advance. If it changes, there's usually a 48-hour notice. I think that's probably enough time. We'll continue this conversation offline and then maybe, for those of you who are on LinkedIn, maybe you'll see a LinkedIn Live notification and you can listen to how the sausage is made and marvel at the number of times that we back up, start over again, clear our throats, say all these stupid filler words that Marcus ends up cutting out.

David: One thing I like about the podcast, too, that I haven't mentioned yet, that I really appreciate the fact that we both made a commitment to this. We don't have sponsors, we don't have ads. There's a little mid-roll thing that basically we could drop because everybody's memorized it. When I'm listening to other podcasts, I'm hitting that fast-forward 30-second thing all the time because I don't want to listen to the ads. I appreciate the fact that this is a listener-friendly thing and I'm glad we can do that.

Blair: Nobody has met our price yet.

[laughter]

But we are for sale. Any other last points you want to hit on before we wrap up and think about what we're going to do for episode 201?

David: Just a huge thank you to the audience for sticking with us. I'm just very grateful for their attention and I love the opportunity to keep doing this for people. It may go another 20 episodes, another 100, who knows? Thank you, audience, for honoring us with your time and your energy. We really appreciate it.

Blair: In the words of Dexter Guff, "Thank you for letting us put our lips on your ears."

[laughter]

Thanks to Marcus for all the great work that he does. Thank you, David, you've been a great partner on this. I'll be back next week. Let's do 201 and we'll just take it episode by episode from there.

David: All right, thanks, Blair.

Blair: Thanks, David.