Lots of you listen to The Mountain Top Podcast, and possibly even X & Y On The Fly also. Awesome. I’m grateful for every one of you, and genuinely appreciate your support over the years.
Well, except for any of you who are among the handful of angry, easily-offended women out there who’ve left appallingly hateful reviews, as if they’re going around searching for relatively decent dudes like me to ruthlessly lambaste for their personal enjoyment.
And to be clear, I’m not excepting them from my appreciation. I’m actually glad they cared enough to show up too. Rather, I’m simply doing them the service of excepting them from being referred to as “supporters” of the show. After all, I’m sure that would offend the hell out of them.
But enough about that. After over a dozen years of producing episodes, it’s time to let you in on fifteen of the deepest, darkest secrets we’ve carefully hidden from public knowledge for years. I mean, why not, right?
1) You generally couldn’t give a rat’s ass how famous the guest is.
This has always confused me to no end. After all, until recently I’ve typically been super stoked when someone particularly well-known has agreed to be on.
For the record, the most excited I’ve ever been about a guest was when Jonathan Goldsmith’s agent wrote me asking to book him on my show. Goldsmith is, of course, most famous for playing “The Most Interesting Man In The World” on Dos XX beer commercials. Dude bailed on me a couple of days before the show. Bummer.
I’m reminded of that other time an agent contacted me about booking the guy who was either dating or married to Kim Kardashian at the time. I was like, “Sure, what the hell?” Then I was given strict instructions NOT to ask anything about Kim Kardashian, and focus only on pitching whatever lame non-profit he wanted to pimp. Game over.
After all, you couldn’t care less about the guest, and you DEFINITELY couldn’t care less about whatever he would have wanted to go on about, because the truth is…
2) …It’s all about the topic.
The most downloaded episodes are almost always about how to relate to women, especially difficult ones. The farther from women we stray, the less you care. Duly noted.
3) The top performing shows are the ones with female co-hosts.
Weirdly, those shows are not only the most downloaded, they’re also the ones you guys complain about the most. Go figure.
The most frequently downloaded episode of all time is #95 on “Why Women Love To Be Seduced” with Jennifer Rhodes. Second is #110 on “How Not To Bore Women To Tears” with Jessica Lastimosa.
For what it’s worth, most of the shows with female guests generally serve as shining examples of how I really, actually interact with women in-field.
4) Each show is fanatically edited.
If you’ve ever wondered how everyone on the show can be so damned articulate all the time, there’s your answer. Ums, ahs, long pauses and fumbled speech is ruthlessly cut out.
Perhaps ironically, the easiest shows to edit are the ones where English is the guest’s second language. The trick there is native English speakers’ ears actually expect imperfect speech in those cases and therefore unconsciously overlook it. As such, editing can be far less of an exact science with little, if any impact on the show’s perceived quality.
For what it’s worth, though, I’ve decided against inviting certain people on because I instinctively knew they’d be a royal nightmare to edit. Production time matters. That said, I am usually at least as hard to edit as any of my guests. That’s mostly because I freely stop and restate stuff during recording when I’m not pleased with it, knowing I can edit it cleanly later. That drives some of my guests nuts, I suspect, but at least I usually warn them ahead of time.
5) I’m self-conscious about interrupting guests.
The sure sign of a poor talk show host is his or her tendency to cut off or even steamroll guests, especially when either losing an argument or flat-out losing control of the show. So when I got a few complaints early on accusing me of rudely interrupting guests, I rode herd on it pretty hard from there.
As a result of the attention to editing mentioned above, however, there are lots of times when you’ll hear me chime in right as a guest is finishing a thought. In real time, there was most likely a longer silence that was trimmed.
Incidentally, one of my biggest pet peeves as an interviewer is when a guest has a habit of sounding exactly like they’ve finished a thought, only to continue on. It makes for awkward flow and tedious edits.
6) I’m pretty much WYSIWYG.
If you talk to me in real life, you’ll find I’m pretty much exactly like you’d expect me to be from listening to the show. Maybe a few more ums, ahs and jumbled sentences.
But seriously, guys who do coaching programs with me seem rather surprised by this once they realize how true it is. I don’t go “into character” or anything. My driver’s license actually says “Scot McKay” on it.
But even though I am a pretty chill, laid-back guy IRL…
7) …I have a reputation for being a rather draconian interviewer.
Admittedly, I’m super fastidious about keeping control of my own show during recording. This was taught to me by a mentor, and it was some of the best advice I’ve ever been given.
This means I give several specific instructions to guests prior to hitting the “record” button, and I’m not shy at all during the actual recording about telling guests when they need to give crisper responses, deliver more objective content, stop talking in circles, stop breathing into the mic, etc.
Having been interviewed myself at least a few hundred times, I’ve never had any interviewer challenge me as much as I challenge my guests. It must be unnerving. But the way I see it, better ingredients, better shows.
I also tend to do my research ahead of time and listen intently during recording. That’s makes for solid questions that in turn foment top-quality content.
Ultimately, however, all of this has caused more than a few guests to shy away from coming on my show, which I know to be a fact. But when they do come on,…
8) …I rescue guests from themselves sometimes.
This has happened in real time, but it usually involves something more subtle that comes out during the editing process. There have been instances when guests inadvertently admitted to things I’m sure they didn’t want to make public, and other times where they subjectively implied something without realizing it would cause them great embarrassment.
Each and every time this has happened, I dutifully edited the episode accordingly. Since I’m not trying to compete with the Jerry Springer Show, I treat all of my guests with respect and go out of my way to make them look good.
Come to think of it, I actually had one guest contact me and request a few major edits to their long-since published episode. They had recently gotten married, and some of what was said during the show suddenly needed to be left “off the record”. No worries. The request was cheerfully granted, and with no real ill-effect to the show. Nobody ever noticed, of course.
9) Guests have come on who don’t know their stuff.
Sometimes, despite a publicist’s best efforts, the proverbial emperor has no clothes.
This can go beyond an alleged expert only being able to play in a relatively small sandbox of talking points. I’ve had guests on who have positioned themselves as world-class experts in a fairly specific field, but when asked a relatively broad-based question on it had NOTHING. I’ve had guests tell me so point blank. Other times, they’ve taken thirty seconds or more to formulate an answer, with the understanding that the dead air would be edited out.
It’s gotten to the point where I’ve had to help some guests find talking points by making a few off-hand suggestions. In those cases, I generally have them pick one and run with it as if they came up with it themselves.
I’ve ultimately enacted tough-love several times because the guest was really struggling to live up to their publicist’s billing. I’ve euthanized interviews within the first few minutes at least twice.
You already know, of course, that The Mountain Top’s episodes are more open discussions than interviews. But now you know why I talk more than my guests on some of the shows. It’s often by necessity.
10) There has only been one guest who abruptly quit mid-show.
The subject was “dating dealbreakers” and naturally, I brought up psychosis. That obviously hit a bit too close to home for the guest, and she really let me have it (incoherently, I might add) before hanging up on me. Her husband later called me up in an attempt to smooth things over. He had obviously had some practice, and man could I relate. Poor bastard.
11) The first nine episodes had a completely different format.
Those shows had a common co-host, and have since been retired. They were great shows, and you can get the collection of them for private consumption, if you’d like. Contrary to rumors at the time, the change in format was mutually agreed upon. He and I are cool with each other to this day.
12) Technology has failed on us, but not nearly as often as you might think.
Audio programs have only glitched during production maybe five times in my entire history of doing interviews. Unfortunately, however, poor Suzanna Matthews’ eventual appearance on the show was preceded by TWO of them, and the issues were completely unrelated. Thank God she’s a friendly, understanding and generally sweet person. Nevertheless, you can imagine my contrition when I had to break the news that the SECOND recording of her episode had crashed and burned…again.
You can listen to the final, clean version as episode #104 on “‘Hidden Detractors’ That Ruin Your Chances”. The third time was the charm, it turned out, as I believe the last take was also the best.
Incidentally, Featured Audio 1 of Get Together, Stay Together was another one. The recording software inexplicably garbled about a third of it. Our transcript guys were actually able to work through the mess with shocking accuracy, and Emily and I re-recorded the bad sections directly from their work. We felt super fortunate that it didn’t have to be completely redone, because we nailed the content the first time.
13) The original name of the show, “The Chick Whisperer”, was coined by a woman.
In the years after that, dozens of more easily-offended women BLASTED me for the title. Never mind that “chick” is taken from the Spanish word “chica”, not chickens.
The name change to The Mountain Top happened a little over two years ago, and was less a matter of political correctness as it was of establishing a broader range of subject matter. Well, that and “whispering” stuff is so 2005.
For what it’s worth, the name change had virtually no directly-attributable effect on download numbers, although it did make a wider range of guests feel more comfortable with coming on. The show has actually increased in popularity more recently, but that’s more because of elbow grease than the name.
14) Several years ago, most podcasts for men got sabotaged.
The way it went down was just about every popular podcast for men started getting hit with negative ratings and reviews on iTunes. Except one.
Meanwhile, all of the affected shows had one thing in common: They were the suggested podcasts at the foot of the unaffected show’s iTunes listing.
After consulting with the hosts of other affected shows, all of whom I knew personally, they unanimously nominated me to find a solution.
As a result, I carefully planned a conversation with the suspected show’s host that was very direct while giving him an easy escape hatch that was a win/win for everyone. That conversation went so freaking well that it became the basis for the now-infamous section in The Big Four Man Challenge about how to handle adversarial conflicts with other men. Voila…the bad rankings and reviews magically stopped after that, but only a few of them were reversed by Apple.
15) Edroy Odem is me.
He’s named after exit 22 of I-37, just northwest of Corpus Christi. He’s also listed as a voice-over talent artist on a major website, and on rare occasion gets some work.
It’s pretty uncomplicated, really. I do the voice impression, then drop the pitch ten decibels in the sound editing software. You can actually email Edroy (edroy@deservewhatyouwant.com). How about that?
Over the years, I’ve done intros for X & Y On The Fly featuring impressions of Sammy Davis, Jr., Regis Philbin, Shaquille O’Neal and a couple of others. Apparently, nobody cared so I (mercifully) stopped. The same probably holds true for this blog post, so I’ll stop it here as well.
Okay, well that took longer than I thought.
If you come up with any questions about the show, or would like some elaboration on any of the weirdness above, leave a comment. I’ll jump in and answer what I can.
Be Good,
Scot McKay
P.S. If you are in a long-term relationship or even THINKING about getting into on, take it from me…you want to get it RIGHT the first time. Emily and I give you all the secrets you need to live the dream and avoid divorce court here. It’s brand new. If you’re a woman, you’ll probably like this one better.
For so long I thought to myself “That intro has got to be Scot, wait he said his name was Edroy never mind, weird they sound so much alike.” lol should of known to trust my gut instinct.
These were awesome insights behind the sciences of your podcast Scot!
Your first two points make the point about what makes your podcasts good ones. The content itself is more important than the source