Graham Brown: What can we learn in the world of podcasts from your experience in TV? Is it a completely different domain or are there elements which we can kind of download and learn from?
Marc Raco: No, I think we can learn from it because to me it's all about storytelling, even in the most basic business-to-business, innovation-based technology podcast. It is all about storytelling and it's something I think we often forget is not just how to story tell ourselves but how to create a format that has the arc of storytelling. We want to move people, and I'll tell you something when we get going if we touch on that as to a discovery I made in asking people about that. Why really people were making podcasts and it had to do with moving people, with inspiring people, with educating, and that you can't sell something. You can't educate, you can't move people without telling a story. And everything I've done in my life in any way, professionally from film school to being a producer, to being an actor, to being in sales, to producing podcasts, you name it, it has all been about telling a story to understand what a seatbelt is. It is not about a piece of metal that goes into another piece of metal and it attaches, and it keeps you contained in an accident. It's about making sure my kids don't die when another teenager crosses the line in the road and hits us broadside. That's what a seatbelt is. Just in that description I have told a story of what could be and makes my mind connect all the dots. And I sold that idea of why a seatbelt would matter by creating a story instead of just laying out some basic facts. So to me, it all relates, and what I've learned about storytelling as an actor or a salesperson, as a filmmaker has just organically infused itself into how I think about podcasting.
Graham Brown: What did you learn about storytelling in film school? What do they teach you there?
Marc Raco: The basis of any story is that there's a beginning, a middle, and an end, and there has to be some sort of conflict. If I don't do this, then this will happen. I was here and now I'm there. I somehow made it to the other side. I invented something and people, and he got people to buy it. It could be as simple as that. Here's what was before and nowhere is what is after and in the time in which there was that transition, there's conflict because it's not quite after, it's not quite after now it's after. And in film school, I remember learning about storytelling by an assignment that had to do with recording sounds just that are around you. How the sound of mailbox makes when it's squeaked, the clinging of the sound that the silverware makes when you jangle it around, the sound of your feet on gravel, capturing all those sounds and then putting them together. So even though they're not telling a literal story, there's no actual context to it. The variance in pattern and volume and pacing and cadence makes you feel like you're going on a journey that builds and resolves. And I realized that there was such a story at one of the examples I most remember was, I don't know if this rings a bell to you, but there's a famous musician that was at the beginning of kind of avant-garde music, Laurie Anderson, and she had a famous song called Oh Superman. And it was very simple for those who don't know the song. It just starts with her going. Huh? Huh? Huh? Huh? Huh? Huh? Huh. Huh. Just over and over again. And it was sort of the beginning of looping when people started to sample and loop. And that was presented to me by one of my film teachers because it was the most simple of sounds, but the way it built and with the most basic of words and the basic of sounds, you felt like you went through a journey. So even coming today to bring it home, when I designed the format of a podcast or even do an interview, I think about it that way. If you sit down with someone in a coffee house and you have a discussion, what happens? You kind of get the things out of the way, you kind of settled down, you get some pleasantries out of the way, then you dive into whatever your journey is for that discussion. It culminates in a result, and then you have some pattern at the end, as you resolve all that and get ready to go your separate ways. That's a rise, a climax and a resolve at the end. And at some point there's a feeling in both of your heads, what's going to happen with this conversation. Will this go somewhere? Will there be a result? What will be the difference in my life from this conversation? And if we can design a conversation so we know we're trying to achieve those things and build those markers into it, even the way we use music, even the, where we decide breaks are going to be for, let's say commercial breaks, even the way we will first thing someone hear sets that tone, all of that tells a story. We don't even realize that we're going through a story we're going through that format that any basic story should have even a children's story. It's the same thing to me.
Graham Brown: How do you then create that authentic? You talked about creating a narrative together. How do you create that story without being scripted? What's the technique there, because I think the default position for a lot of people is to script because they're nervous about doing podcasts. How do you create that sort of narrative arc?
Marc Raco: I wish I could say it's scientific ground, but to me, it's about going through a journey of discovery myself and learning along with the listener, knowing just enough to, you don't get to liken it to doing a scene as an actor. If you go into the scene and you've rehearsed a hundred times and all your lines and every point you're going to hit and every market every second, and it's highly choreographed. I used to do things as an actor for Kodak, where they would test different kinds of films and we would do the same exact scene with the exact same timing to the second. 70 or 90 times in a row because they needed to test different apertures and different films, nothing changed, but there was no soul in it. It was just a recycling of the same moment. If you go into a scene as an actor and you know your lines, but you haven't predicted yet what you're exactly going to do in that moment, you can really react to things the other actors are going to do and what you feel in that moment. And it's much more real. It feels much more extemporaneous and organic. So the same thing to me applies in, let's say an interview-based podcast or even a monologue, you script out enough to know the points you want to hit the mile markers you want to arrive at some point certain questions you must ask so that those basic content pieces are there, but I don't want to know the ending. I want to discover it along with the listener because my natural curiosity will make me dig deeper. It doesn't just go, well this is one of my seven questions. I've technically asked it. The person talked for five minutes and answer the question, they seem satisfied that should be enough. Let me move on. Big mistake to me because I'm still left wanting, and I guarantee you, there are certain members of the, honestly that going, wait, wait, wait, wait, don't move on. He just got going. It just got interesting. Dig deeper, please.
Graham Brown: The rabbit hole.
Marc Raco: So what I prefer to do is I prefer to go right to where I want to know. I call it diving in the middle of the pool and swimming back, and then we'll go in and swim our way through the pool because not only does that capture the listeners' interest initially. It lets me go right to where the interesting part of the story is for me, my curiosity, instead of going through an exercise of discovering some basic factoids for context about the person. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's get to the interesting stuff right away. And so coming back to your question to me, I guess I just really want to discover with the listener. So the places I go or the places the hosts that I'm producing for, go is almost the same place that the listeners organically going next to wherever their mind goes. Geez, I'd like to know about, oh, look, they're asking that question because it naturally occurred to them. And because of that, we have the sense of a story unfolding. In a way that the mystery to all of us, but the person who knows how the story goes is the guest.
Graham Brown: It's almost like a live experience. Isn't it? You've got parallels with that. Yeah. Improv, standup, comedy, live music, theater. We as an audience really enjoy that. Like you can listen to the album if they listen to albums these days still, but it's rehearsed and it's refined and it sounds the same every time, and yet why do we long for those live experiences? Because in a sense, they're on the edge, aren't they, it could go wrong. It could completely screw up in the whole open up and we all fall inside it. But that's what we love about it. That's why we love life. The fact they do make mistakes and in some ways the same as podcasts, isn't it? That they are human. Nevermind.
Marc Raco: I think therein lies, the charm of some of the more successful shows. If we listen to Joe Rogan, I feel like it's just two guys in a garage having a conversation, and I happened to be in a chair in the corner. If I listened to the Gimlet show start-up, I'm witnessing real things happening, not things that were engineered. I'm really a witness. So when we started at mouth media and I were, when we started designing what a podcast would be like for us, we wanted to have real conversations that didn't feel like you got a CD of it in the mail and then listen to it later. But instead like somehow you got invited into the room. We said, don't say anything, which you can sit here and listen to everything and be in on all the conversations equally, almost, when I bring guests on and I, every single guest of any show I've ever produced for 1500 shows or whatever it's been over the years, every single show I think I've said the same thing to the inaudible. I said, think about this as if we just ran into each other at a festival or in the park, and we had beers in our hands. We said, oh my God, we got in this great conversation. And we said, you know what? I really wish this was such a great conversation. I wish someone had recorded this so we could share it with other people that would have been the grace. I say, well, guess what? That is what we're doing here. We're secretly recording our conversation so we can share it with other people. And because we do it that way, we think with, through that lens, it affects the way people approach it. Even when I have people trying to read the narration, I try to change the lens that thinking about that narration through this, for example, if you read a newspaper out loud to someone on a Sunday morning, you don't read it like this. A man 36 years old was hit by a car on the street. And he got picked up by an ambulance and went to the hospital and he died. You don't say it that way at all. You sell the story, man, you go, oh, check this out, honey, a man, 36 years old, he got hit by a car. And the ambulance came up, but we sell the story. So if we think, if we just change all about changing your paradigm to feel like you're in the moment, and if you do that, if you allow yourself to live in that moment, like you said, I believe the listener will feel entertained. Think about these great movies that are shot in such a way that you forget it's not real. You feel like you're in the movie, you're so absorbed. You feel like you're in it. And that is such a wonderful experience because, in the end, we're doing shows because we want to inspire, we're doing shows cause we want to educate. In some cases, we're doing shows because we want to advance our businesses or our notoriety, or somehow we want to generate enough interest that we can get some money coming our way, whatever our motivation is. In the end, part of the necessary DNA of being successful is to entertain. Most of the time people don't feel like a podcast is great because it had the best information. Because if they didn't want to listen to it, they never would've gotten the information. It's a great podcast cause they enjoy listening to it. They feel involved, they feel moved and the by-product of it is they learn some great information, they can now absorb and take somewhere else. Otherwise. You were just marking time. So entertaining is so important so that living in the moment makes me feel like I'm part of it. I'm entertained, I'm immersed and therefore it has more meaning to me, and I want to come back. Because if you think about a podcast, if someone on average, let's say subscribes to five podcasts and listens to three on a religious basis, that's valuable real estate in someone's life. To earn the right to hold that place week after week, you better be delivering some real value and entertainment is a big part of it.
Graham Brown: Absolutely. I'm a believer. I mean, if you look at advertising throughout the ages. It's always entertained. At first, it was to inform wasn't it, sort of like old-fashioned style, look at how white these shirts are, but then it realized that to win people's attention to hold it, you had to entertain people.
Marc Raco: Who's your favorites, your favorite teacher in school. I'm sorry to interrupt. Your favorite teacher in school wasn't the one that knew the most about history. It was the funniest teacher or the most entertaining teacher that went the extra mile. Yes. That's who moves you.
Graham Brown: But how do you then impart that on somebody who hasn't had the training, meaning, I'm a C level and my life in the corporate world has been about, hiding behind the brands, really. And to some extent, being efficient, as opposed to being authentic. I'm not me, I'm a representative. So now you're asking me to sit down and be authentic and I don't have this sort of acting training. And whilst I might agree with you in principle when actually you learned the rubber hits the road, I may pull back from the moment of truth and go back to the scripted format because I feel safe that it's sort of in my comfort zone. So how do you get people out of that? And really, I suppose in a way, be vulnerable and live in that moment, what all sort of techniques and tips do you have for those kinds of people?
Marc Raco: I love this question and I don't know that there's a nice encapsulated, perfect shiny answer to it. Here's the answer. But I do think that like most things, I liken it to good portrait photography. The best photographs are taken when the person is off guard, it's almost in between the moments when you catch someone relax when they're not posing and that's the real them. And that's when they're most beautiful or most handsome or look most interesting. It's those great in-between moments. And I think a lot of it is showing people and giving them permission to relax and let themselves go, cause most of the time we're simply in our own way. And we think we need to be a host. We think we need to put on a performance and you're already a successful business person in many cases, because you are engaging and you're interesting and you develop relationships. In most cases. Those are the people that will, look the programmer in the back room, who never talks to anybody probably will never gravitate to doing a podcast anyway, from a business standpoint, in other words, going out and doing thought leadership. In most cases, it's just a different type of personality that will gravitate to doing that. So most of the people that are going to end up on the microphone are people who already know how to interact with people. You just have to give them permission to let go and feel what it is like to let go, and then have them experience that and say, isn't that awesome. And then create room in the recording process for them to make mistakes and have new shots at it and succeed. And the more someone does that and they say, gosh, I don't sound stupid. I hate my voice like literally every other human being on the planet, but I don't sound stupid because you did a good job editing me. And I did say something intelligent and you did a good job coaching me on an idea for a question, and we created a format that allowed me to play, and explore, and then we just kept the good parts. And then the more that confidence builds, the more a person will be in my experience will be willing to explore and let go. And the minute they do that, it's a lot, like if you ever watch a TV series from the beginning and you look at the pilot show in the first episode, everyone looks so tense and concentrated. And then like by the second season everyone's more relaxed and they kind of got into their characters and you could see such a difference. You don't see it when you first watch it, but in comparison you see it and you'll see once people just let themselves relax, most people, my point is most people have it in them, in my belief, and that's been my experience. Most people can be good by letting themselves go. And frankly, speaking through the magic of editing, they can ask a question horribly in the interview and later we can rerecord the question and to the audience they're going to sound like a masterful question asker. They knew what they wanted to ask. They just, weren't great at asking in the moment, but once they hear they can do it, then they let go and can succeed also. That's my take out anyway.
Graham Brown: Yeah. That's a good take. I'm thoroughly inspired by your words as well and I think people should be as well thinking that it's in them. Okay. So lastly, then what do you think in podcasting now we're looking forward next few years. Cause obviously the U S is pretty advanced as a market. What's underrated at the moment. What sort of isn't getting the prominence it should be yet. You kind of have a conviction about it that you think this is going to be, big. Everybody's talking about, for example, advertising, but what is, outside of that, that you see in your world that we should really be paying attention to? That isn't as exciting right now because it hasn't got the Mindshare.
Marc Raco: I don't think I'm coming up with anything novel here, but I think that people just want to connect and the pandemic has amplified that realization inside us. I think that's evidenced by things like Clubhouse that are, certainly huge in America. And I know they're starting to impact other regions of the world as well. That's just audio, and it's just listening to people, connecting with each other and sharing what they know and being in on the conversation. And I think about how many more brands are scrambling to create podcasts now. And not because it's the in thing, because they realize that the process of having access to people and hearing their story and hearing what they're about with context and tone and earnestness like you have immediate access to that person, matters. I think the reason that podcasting has boomed is because it was a way for us to easily and affordably connect with each other, and the point of being heard is so that you reach someone. That's a connection in my mind. And I think about the growth of internal communication using the podcast model within brands. It's because getting a written memo doesn't do it anymore. I want to hear what the CEO sounds like. I want to hear it in their voice, that they're telling me the truth, that they mean it, that they're accessible to me that I matter. And I think about the, as the last part of this, I think about our youngest generations that we see buried in their phones as if I'm not buried in mine, but they're buried in their phones and they don't even talk to each other in other rooms, they text each other from room to room. And again, going back to something like clubhouse, it is to me, illustrating that we are starting, it's starting to dawn on us, that we are starting to miss the opportunity to talk with people and to hear from them what they really want to say. And so I think the future, not just podcasting, but the role that audio will have and the way we do business, the way we interact with each other is only going to grow exponentially. And I think a lot of that has to do with the way audio impacts our brain away. It interacts with our brain in a way that's very different than say video is a little more of a passive experience. Audio interacts with our brains. Obviously, as most people know in the same way that say reading a good book does. We fill in a lot of the blanks, it's a very active use of different parts of our brain and helps release chemicals in our brain in a way that other types of mediums don't. So as we start to experience that through podcasting, through clubhouse, through new apps, like we've created at Mouth media called story dot, which allows brands to tell their stories and then connect with consumers wherever they are in their consumer journey. And invite them to engage and then share as a brand ambassador. It's really just using audio to connect one thing with another, one person with another. I think we are rediscovering audio because it engages in a more intimate way with us because we have a role in it. We will just sit back and watch what someone else put together with us. We have to participate and I think we want to. So I think everything that comes out of audio is going to have to do with an opportunity to at least feel like you're participating, which is why there's certainly new innovations bubbling up that are allowing audio to engage with communities in more active way, for example.