The Root Cause: Why the Experts Stay Silent
Guest: Marc Babin — Hospitality marketer turned creative director turned podcast builder
This is a text version of the following podcast episode
for those who prefer reading :)
Marc Babin spent four years making 106 videos for Westin and Marriott in the Cayman Islands with zero video experience, then six years at AnyLine building an entire content infrastructure from scratch — a dozen podcasts across industry verticals, over a hundred episodes, and a bronze at the Transformer Awards Europe. This year he launched The Podcast Blueprint. He’s also the person Nune works with on her own brand, so this is no cold interview: it’s a conversation with someone who has watched her perfectionism, her frustration with the algorithm, and her discomfort with being visible online up close — all while she hits record on her show for the very first time.
Has the volume killed content?
Marc Babin: Thank you for having me. It’s a great pleasure and an honor to be the first guest on what will be a large show. But first I want to say congratulations on taking this step — not only into the podcasting world, after everything we’ve spoken about to get here, but for taking all the little steps too: rearranging the room, getting the equipment, committing to it. All of that contributed to where we are today, hitting record for the first time. That’s a monumental moment, and one I want you to sit with. You hit record for the first time on your show. That’s epic, and a massive congratulations to you.
Nune: Thanks for being on this road. You’ve been a tremendous help, both technically and mentally. What I wanted to talk to you about first is the sheer volume of content nowadays. Even before AI, content was everywhere — and now with AI it’s faster and louder. Your entire career is around content, marketing, video, podcasts. Do you think content making is still a valid path to marketing, or even to self-expression — or has the sheer volume just destroyed it?
Marc Babin: Absolutely, yes, to the first part of that question. The volume hasn’t killed it, and let me explain why. Most of what’s flooding the internet right now is noise — you know this, everyone knows this, it’s just noise. My own estimate, and this doesn’t come from anywhere, it’s purely from experience: I’d say 70% of it has zero real marketing value. It’s a lot of noise for doom scrollers.
But that’s actually good news. I genuinely think it’s good news, because it means the bar for standing out, for breaking through that noise, is completely achievable. I know this because I’ve done it multiple times, in multiple formats, in multiple industries. It does work if you can break out of the noise cycle.
Good, authentic, powerful content still cuts through. I’ve watched it happen firsthand, building podcasts and building videos. B2B, B2C — it doesn’t matter. Good authentic content will still cut through, and the opportunity to do that is very real and very achievable for most people. People get afraid that they’re just going to fall into the noise and be unheard like everyone else.
The mistake marketers make is treating content like a calendar-filling exercise — they check it off the daily task list: “I’ve got to make posts for Monday.” I fall into this too; everyone does. It becomes this downbeat, cloudy “I’ve got to get this done, I’ve got to make content for the week.” That’s the mistake, and I have to remind myself constantly not to think of it like that. The people who produce content and actually care about what they’re making — social managers who care about what’s being published — those are the ones who succeed. In my last role I worked with an incredible social manager who genuinely cared about what went out and fought to make sure the content was genuine. That makes a real difference. It makes you stand out from the noise. It’s tangible — we see it in the results all the time.
Nune: Two things. I feel it in myself whenever I force myself onto a schedule — and the algorithm pushes you toward that, because the more consistent you are, the better, as everyone says. But the moment it becomes scheduled, it becomes a job, you start hating it, and you start squeezing the content out of yourself. You want to speak when you have something to say, not force it. On the reality side: do you think AI-generated content will always be visible — meaning people will tell you apart from the AI — or will it become indistinguishable at some point?
Marc Babin: I think it will always be distinguishable. You just need to be more aware. We see this in the real world all the time now: an image or a video gets posted, and the comment section is always “please tell me this is real,” “please tell me this is fake,” “this is obviously AI.” As AI improves, that’s going to get harder and harder to distinguish just by looking at it. So those 15-second clips, the noise — that’ll always be a bit more difficult to tell apart, because the piece is so short.
But when we talk about content that matters, content that has purpose, that will always be easier to tell what’s real and what’s not. You’re never going to see a fully AI-generated podcast that you’ll know is fake. It’s going to read as real, just based on how people talk and the tone of voice. The imperfection is the real truth. It’s the humanity. People relate to imperfection, and in a world where everything we see is AI-perfect, that imperfection — that real human authenticity — is what stands out. I hope it’ll never be replicated; maybe that’s a future conversation. But the pauses I take, the “ums,” the “ahs,” all of it tells the listener I’m a real person.
I was told once — and you probably know this better than I do — about those checkboxes on websites and forms: “check the box if you’re not a robot.” The whole concept, and this has always stuck with me, is that they were designed to detect imperfection, the imperfect way a human checks a box. This is going to change the way everyone listening sees these boxes from now on. If that box shows up on a window and it’s a spam bot, an AI bot, a robot, it will just straight-line for that check and click.
A human will never just straight-line. There’s imperfection in the way we move, the way we think about it, the timing it takes. That imperfection is exactly what lets us pass the checkbox quiz. It’s not about checking the box — a robot can check the box — it’s the imperfection in the process. It’s the same with content. AI is not a straight line, but it’s a prompt and a response; the prompts may evolve and the responses may evolve, but it’s still a straight line. Humans don’t think that way. We reason, we question, we pause, we make mistakes.
I used to say “content is king.” Everyone was saying it, I said it, I believed it, I drank the juice. But it’s not true anymore. Content is not king. Good content is king. Good, authentic content is king — and it’s important that content creators know the difference.
Why podcasting still works
Nune: True — there’s so much sci-fi that’s made the same point: imperfection is what makes you human. You mentioned 15-second clips. They call this the reel-thinking generation, with shrinking attention spans — you just swipe next, swipe next. And yet here we are, sitting and talking, and this will run at least 30 or 40 minutes. Who has time to listen to two people talk about anything these days? Given that, do you think podcasting is still a valid path for marketing?
Marc Babin: It’s a good question, but here’s what I find fascinating: our perception versus what the actual data tells us. This is where data-driven insights overshadow what we assume. The data pushes back on the premise. Podcast listening has gone up, not down — even as short form has exploded. Short form exploded and the attention span on those short clips is swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe; each one is a different piece of content. I’ll come back to that. But the stats don’t lie. I have one pulled up here — a US-based report. It showed that podcast listeners in the US rack up 773 million hours of listening per week. That’s a 350% jump since 2015.
So something else is going on. This isn’t just about attention spans. What people are really starved for isn’t short content, it’s content that respects their intelligence. A 15-second reel can entertain you for 15 seconds, ten seconds, five seconds — but then you’re onto the next one. You’re not gaining anything from it. It can’t change how you think about something, and it can’t build real trust with an audience. All those scrolls you do — do you even know any of those followers? A lot are bought accounts, fake accounts, just chasing likes to make a paycheck. You can’t build value there.
Podcasters do things differently, and that’s why it works and why it’s still growing. Here’s the other piece of the puzzle: context matters. When someone puts in their earbuds and heads out for a drive to work, or does a workout while listening to a podcast, they’re not doom scrolling. They’re in a completely different headspace. They chose to do that. They chose to listen to that show. That’s an incredibly valuable piece of marketing, and it’s still very much untouched.
So it’s important to see the distinction between short form and long form. They’re not competing. They live in two different worlds. Yes, they’re on the same device; yes, it’s all content — but they’re not competing. They serve completely different jobs. The mistake is assuming attention spans have shrunk across the board. What’s actually happening is that people have become more selective about how they spend their time. They’ll give you 15 seconds of low commitment in bed or on the sofa while watching a Netflix show — but they’ll also give you an hour if you’ve earned it. That’s why I literally dropped everything I had going on career-wise to build the business I have now and share my passion for this format. Podcasting is about earning that time, and it’s very much under-tapped.
They’ll give you 15 seconds of low commitment on the sofa — but they’ll also give you an hour if you’ve earned it.
Nune: That’s exactly why I decided to start Root Cause — I want real content, real conversations. So much content isn’t real, and even when it’s not AI-generated, it still isn’t real. You start thinking, why don’t I create the content I can’t find? So I agree. One thing I was curious about: in your previous role at AnyLine you made podcasts about topics that aren’t exactly sexy or entertaining — automotive, tire tech, retail, logistics. You and I even did an episode on power and utilities. How do you make that kind of content interesting? Or do you not have to, because it’s about choosing the audience and context again?
Marc Babin: 100% correct — you just answered the question for me. It’s not interesting to a lot of people, but it’s interesting to a few, and those few are exactly who we were speaking to. And I made mistakes along the way. The reason we started podcasting at AnyLine was COVID: we lost the ability to reach people the way we would at events, to have those natural, raw conversations. So we did the webinar cycle — everyone did the webinar cycle. It fizzled out. Once everyone started doing it, it became everyone competing for the same space, one big sales conversation, people getting pushier and pushier. Webinars had their moment, but the raw conversations, the genuine connection points, were lost. That’s why we started podcasting.
We did a generic show at first, because I didn’t know much about it — I dive first and look later. But I learned we had to be more specific about our targets. So we made different shows for different industries: automotive, retail, logistics, technology, AI. There was one more I can’t remember. We built shows to speak to the few, not the quantity — targeting quality. By targeting the quality of the people listening, we could have much more in-depth conversations, because we knew the people listening were genuinely interested.
You’re right, they were boring topics — absolutely boring. Talking about tire technology, or the latest AI robot for the logistics field, isn’t interesting to 99% of people. But we were never targeting the 99%. We were targeting the 1% who might get something out of it, then reach out and have a conversation with us. It was that super-niche focus that built the dedicated audiences we had on those channels, and they grew. You think you’re talking to a niche group, but there are so many people in the world that even a niche group is still large enough to build an audience from.
We grew to the point where people were asking to come on the show because they’d heard us. That’s how you know you’ve more or less made it a success — when people want to be on your platform. That’s how we made it interesting: we forgot about everyone else and focused on who we wanted to speak to. This wasn’t a one-on-one conversation, it was a five-on-one conversation — an elevated discussion with experts about expert topics. That filtered who listened, and that made it a better audience for us.
Nune: Niche down, as they say — and you still find yourself with a lot of people in that niche.
Marc Babin: Absolutely. People forget there are a lot of people out there. Everyone’s obsessed with fame and popularity — “I want millions of this, millions of that.” Just start chipping away. The numbers will come. Our automotive show, our biggest show, was probably around 3 million views by the time I left the company — and it was revenue-generating. It was successful, despite being super-niche topics. We chipped away at it episode by episode, year by year. You have to play the long game with this stuff.
Sales, marketing, and the long game
Nune: I’m honestly just out seeking my people, and hopefully that makes it a success. You mentioned sales briefly, and I’m going to be intentionally naive here. You once told me, “I’m not good at sales, I’m a marketing guy.” In my head I thought, isn’t that kind of the same? For tech people, everyone who isn’t in tech — sales, marketing, PR — those are the people who talk with people, versus people who talk with computers. I ask because a lot of tech people don’t want to be selling themselves, and marketing feels like going out and saying “look how cool I am.” It always feels a bit weird, especially for people with imposter syndrome — and a lot of tech professionals have that. So what do you tell them? How do they get out of that feeling, and what’s the difference?
Marc Babin: Honestly, you’re not completely wrong. People get precious about the distinction, and often the ones who insist on it aren’t very good at either. Here’s how I actually think about it. Sales is a conversation with one person at a time. You’re trying to move that one person to a decision — usually on their timeline, or their budget, or to push a product. But it’s one person.
Marketing is the same conversation, but at scale, and before they’re even ready to buy — way above the funnel, early in the pipeline. You’re not closing anyone. Your goal is not to close anyone on a decision or move their timeline. Your goal is to make sure that when the moment comes, they already trust you. That’s the brilliance of marketing, the real distinction: it’s a trust-building exercise, and the people who get that make the sales process much easier down the line.
Podcasting is one of the best examples I’ve seen of this. Think about what happens when someone has listened to your show for four, six, eight months. They feel like they know you. They trust your thinking, your process, how you deliver. They’ve heard how you handle hard questions. Your authenticity spills through. That’s not selling. But by the time that person enters your sales process — if they enter it — half the work’s already done. They know you. You don’t have to do that part for anything you want to sell them. They’re going to listen, and that’s the hard part done.
So yes, marketing is about moving people, but the best marketing feels like that — and that’s why I love it. To come back to that quote of mine, the more accurate phrase is: I’m not good at closing. I’m good at storytelling, I’m good at relationship building. It’s not that I don’t enjoy sales; I don’t enjoy the closing process. That’s why I call myself a marketer. I’m a storyteller, and I help move the needle to make it easier for the sales team down the line. Marketing is very much a long game. I’ll touch on this more later with one of your questions, but the work I do today doesn’t affect tomorrow. Recording this episode now isn’t going to change your world tomorrow — but it’ll change things in three to six months. Not doing it now means that three-to-six-months from now looks different too, but your tomorrow stays the same.
Nune: When I started putting myself more online, here’s what I was thinking. When I join any project and start working with the people on it, first impressions are usually that people are a bit skeptical, and you have to earn their trust over the course of the project. Every meeting you’re not late to and you’re prepared for, every task you promise and deliver — that builds trust. You don’t notice it, but months later they say, “it’s so nice to work with Nune, Nune is great.” And every project you repeat those months of trust-building. So I thought: I need to externalize that. Put it out once, so when people Google me and watch my videos, those months of trust-building get shortened — at least a bit — because I say what I think and speak the way I normally speak, and that already shows a genuine side of me and cuts the onboarding shorter. That was the intention.
Marc Babin: It’s not even just shortening the onboarding. You’re talking about a relationship with a person in a professional setting, and that’s hard to build when you walk into a room cold. Take a sales call: if you’ve never met that person, you’re not only trying to push a product they may or may not need, you’re also trying to build a relationship in that short window. That’s a lot to accomplish at once, and that’s why good salespeople are good at what they do — I respect them 100% — because they’re establishing the relationship, showing as much authenticity as they can (whether it’s genuine or falsified is a separate conversation), and then giving them something.
Think of a car dealership. The good salespeople aren’t the ones who say “which car do you want? Come take a drive” — those are the aggressive ones. The ones who ask “what are you after? I have a family too, I love that” — they establish relatability. Those are the ones who succeed. It’s the same with what you described: if you’ve built a relationship with someone over time and you finally meet them, you can skip right to the technical talk. So I’m a big fan of the long game when it comes to awareness-based and content-based marketing, because it builds trust between a brand and a person, or a person and a person. You’re going to do this show, you’re going to speak to a lot of people. When you approach someone in the future and say “I want to talk about this business opportunity,” it’s going to be a lot easier because they’ve listened to you, they know you, they understand you. Maybe they know someone you’ve spoken to, so your credibility checks out. People undervalue what that can bring — “it’s too much work, it’s a long game, it’s six months from now” — but it matters.
B2B, B2C, and the case for personal visibility
Nune: You’ve worked in corporate brand strategy for years, and you said B2B and B2C don’t matter. Do you really think they’re the same? Now you’ve got The Podcast Blueprint, and you’ll be helping both companies and individuals. Do you approach those differently, or is it all the same? And why do you think it’s important, in this day and age, for a single person to work on their own social presence and marketing — or is it enough to go along with their company and not express their own personal brand?
Marc Babin: It’s easier said than done. On the B2B versus B2C part: I’ve built a process, and I’ve been refining it, that’s universal. As long as the process is followed, only the messaging changes. You don’t change the process — you stick to the fundamentals of building a good show and good content; it’s the messaging that changes. Having worked in both worlds, if I went back to start over in hospitality, I’d approach it with this process and it would lead to successful content. That doesn’t change.
On visibility: you’ve got people, like yourself, who are experts at what they do — but you’ve been busy. And then you fall into this spin cycle of “too busy to post, no one’s going to watch it anyway, what’s the point?” A lot of people feel exactly that way, and I completely agree it’s real. It comes right back to what we were talking about with noise: the loudest voices online are often the ones with the most time to be loud, not the most experience to share. The people aggressively posting on social media all the time, doing all the comments — they have time to do that. That’s your first red flag.
For the people on the flip side — experts and professionals who want to build a brand but are afraid of falling into the noise — there are tools. AI is starting to lower the barrier, which is genuinely exciting, but it’s also a trap. If a 15-year veteran starts auto-generating LinkedIn posts that sound like everyone else, with the same emoji dots and the same “if I didn’t do this, I would do that” — we’ve all seen it — they’ve just joined the noise. They haven’t cut through it, and they’re going to lose their credibility. And that credibility is the whole asset. You can’t outsource a point of view. That’s really important to know.
So, on personal branding: why does it matter right now? Because trust is the scariest thing to achieve, but it’s also the scarcest thing on the market right now. Authenticity and trust are the hardest things to find, because while anyone can produce content, not anyone can produce content that makes you think, “this person actually knows what they’re talking about.” That little gap, that little sliver, is the opportunity. You know a lot about what you do, and you don’t want to fall into the hole where it becomes noise.
For people who are too busy building to be performing — like you’ve been for years, like many executives — there’s no better way than podcasting and short videos that show the most natural form of yourself in the most natural format. You’re not just writing a post like everyone can do. You’re not crafting a caption with AI. You’re just talking about what you know, the way you’d talk about it with a colleague. That’s where the real expertise comes out, and an audience will feel the difference immediately. That’s why they’ll make the decision to tune in and watch.
You can’t outsource a point of view. The loudest voices online are often the ones with the most time to be loud, not the most experience to share.
Nune: This is exactly what I want to encourage busy builders to do. As a community of IT people who’ve been around long enough to see what’s hype and what’s real, this is what we need — experienced people who are building things to talk, and to find a little time to set up the infrastructure around their content. It takes some time, but once you set it up and find your groove, it’s similar to setting up your tech environment. Every developer knows you need your environment comfortable, from the notebook to the software on it; you need everything at hand. Once you have it, you’re crazy productive. I think it’s the same here — once you set everything up, you can just do it while you build.
Marc Babin: That’s it. Talk to me about the excitement you got from setting it up. We had those conversations — getting the equipment, seeing the quality, setting up your space. It re-motivates you. It’s like, “this is actually really cool.”
Nune: Definitely. A lot of techies are into equipment of any kind, and that’s a trap. On one side you want to set it up and be done with it; on the other, once you get a good mic you’re all about the sound, and once you get a good camera you’re all about setting it up perfectly and making videos and having fun with it. So the process of setting it up fuels the making of the content. I can relate to that.
Marc Babin: It helps motivate you through the build process. And then the next level of anxiety kicks in: “well, now I actually have to use it.” But if you’ve built it, they will come.
Nune: It’s both frustration and fun. That’s also what building products is about — both frustration and fun. Maybe anything you do that you enjoy has both elements in it.
Marc Babin: 100% agree.
The perfectionism trap
Nune: There’s one thing that ties experts together: the perfectionism trap. I’ve seen it in myself — it took me a long time to say “all right, I’m ready to hit record,” because I wanted it to be perfect. You’ve said before, “embrace the imperfection and let your content be real.” For someone who built a whole career around precision — making sure a thousand tests pass before deploying to production — that advice to just be real and get things out there is almost a personality change. So what would you tell me, or others who suffer from perfectionism, when it comes to content?
Marc Babin: You’re right, and I’ve seen it, and I say that with full respect, because it usually comes from the best people. I genuinely believe the ones who care most about quality are the ones most paralyzed by it. That’s the reality. But here’s where I’d reframe it. Your career was built on precision because the stakes at the time demanded it. A wrong decision, a bad brief, a miscalculated product launch — those have real, immediate consequences. So your brain learned, over and over, to get it right before it goes out. That defines how a perfectionist thinks.
But content doesn’t work that way, and it’s really important people know the distinction. The cost of an imperfect post is almost zero. Who cares? No one cares — and that’s actually what makes it imperfect. But the cost of never posting is enormous, because no one knows you exist. I’ll say it again because it matters: the cost of an imperfect post is zero, but the cost of never posting is huge, because no one knows you exist.
I’ve seen it again and again — the content that performs best is rarely the most polished. It’s the most honest. It has the most mistakes or flaws. A 60-second video where someone says something real and unscripted will outperform a perfectly produced two-minute piece almost every time. Audiences aren’t looking for a broadcast, they’re looking for a person.
Here’s one example — I don’t think he’ll mind me sharing, but I’ll leave his name out. In my last role we were creating a lot of content around a technology product. One of our sales executives just went out, made a video about it on his own with his own camera, showed what he was doing, and posted it. The marketing team, myself included, freaked out: “No, don’t do that, take it down, it has so many things wrong with it, there are errors, it’s too long, that’s not how this works.” It became the highest-performing piece of content his channel has ever seen. It outperformed anything we’d ever made. You can’t manufacture that — it’s a shooting star. But it succeeded precisely because it showed the imperfection.
There’s an art to creating content that shows imperfection, and I love that art, because it’s about how unscripted and easy you can make it look. But my actual advice is: don’t lower your standards, redirect them. Stop asking “is this perfect?” and start asking “is it true? Is it useful? Does it even sound like me?” If the answer to any of those is yes, post it. The cost of not posting is bigger than the cost of posting. Separate your content perfectionism from the perfectionism in your work life and product life, because you need to be perfect there — absolutely respect that. But when it comes to producing content, put that perfectionism aside, because the cost of not doing it is much higher than the cost of doing it, even if it’s bad.
The cost of an imperfect post is zero, but the cost of never posting is huge — because no one knows you exist.
Nune: I like that — rewriting the acceptance criteria. Not the content itself being perfect, but you inside it being your most genuine self. That you can evaluate. Consider that the bar.
Marc Babin: Consider that the perfect. That’s a nice way to put it, actually.
Nune: And a lot of the time, even when you get past perfectionism and post it, you get three likes from your friends and one from a coworker, and that’s it — and you feel, why even bother? Once you’ve spent 15 years in something, you’re usually good at it, and it’s very hard to be not good at something. A lot of people in IT love learning — that’s the whole reason they’re in IT — but failing at something from zero, with no experience, feels weird, and you end up feeling even less confident than before. But I’ll answer this one myself: embrace the time when you don’t have a lot of likes or followers, because that’s the space to play, to try things. As we said, nobody cares — so put out whatever content you want, try it, see what you enjoy, so you can keep going instead of carrying the pressure of “did I get enough likes or not.” Right?
Marc Babin: You’re 100% right, and what you’re describing is real. It’s not a weakness, it’s a reality. You spent 15 years becoming an expert whose opinion matters in a room, and now you publish something and the internet is silent. That’s a genuine psychological hit — don’t let anyone tell you different.
But I’m not going to give you the whole “trust the process” BS, because that’s not helpful, it’s cliché. Here’s what I’ll push back on, and you alluded to it: you’re measuring the wrong thing. If all you’re looking at is who’s liking it, you’re measuring the wrong thing. Say you make a post and get four likes. That’s four people who stopped scrolling on a platform designed and built to keep people moving. That’s not nothing. You have an idea of who those four people are — maybe three are friends or family, but one might be a decision-maker at a company you’ve been trying to get in front of for years. Content works quietly, slowly, and then it doesn’t.
The other thing: you’re not competing with the person who has hundreds of thousands of likes, so don’t compare yourself to them. You’re competing with the version of yourself that didn’t post anything. If you got four likes, you’re winning — because the person who didn’t post has zero. And again, it doesn’t affect tomorrow, but it’ll affect something six months from now. I love the six-month concept, that half-year shadow effect. Everything you post lives forever. It exists forever, and you never know when it’ll come back to life. It works while you’re sleeping, hitting other parts of the world, found by someone in that time. You don’t know the perspective, the context, or the world they’re in — but you don’t get any of that from staying quiet.
So don’t compare yourself to the people getting big results. Don’t compare yourself to who you are in a boardroom getting a huge reaction because you’re the expert. Compare it to what you’d have if nothing happened. Start small, be consistent, and stop checking the likes — the likes don’t matter. They’re useless. It’s an ego hit, but accept it. The likes don’t matter.
You’re not competing with the person who has thousands of likes. You’re competing with the version of yourself that didn’t post anything.
Nune: That’s definitely something we need to get comfortable with. There were moments I thought LinkedIn had blacklisted me and I was just shouting into the void. But yeah — try to enjoy it.
Marc Babin: I know the feeling. I absolutely know it. But again, you feel that because you’re comparing it to what other people’s posts are getting. Someone saw your post, someone read it, someone took something from it. Whether you ever speak to them or not, someone took something from it — and who knows what that turns into.
From private to intentional
Nune: Yeah, that feeds my ego, that’s enough. There’s another thing that always held me back from posting a lot, and I think a lot of ‘90s kids will relate. I’ve been online since the ‘90s, and for a long time — until I woke up in 2026 and everyone was online — the rule was you shouldn’t be online that much. From a security perspective: your name, your address, your email. Everyone tried to lessen their digital footprint. And then suddenly that’s a losing game. So how would you help someone navigate that shift, from “I need to be careful” to “I have to do this, because otherwise nobody knows I exist”?
Marc Babin: I love that you brought this up. It’s one of the most underrated tensions in everything we’re talking about today — the shift from how you used to think to how you have to think now about online publicity and privacy. You didn’t do anything wrong. That instinct — protect yourself, stay private, be careful — was exactly right for that era. The internet was a different place. Anonymity was your armor, your protective layer, and the people who wore that armor well were the smart ones.
Now it’s not that privacy stopped mattering — it matters more, arguably — it’s that trust became a form of currency, and you can’t build trust being anonymous. The internet grew up, just like we all did, and became the primary place where professional relationships begin. That’s how we first met — over the internet, years ago, when we did the podcast — and that changed everything you’re doing now.
Nune: I haven’t thought of it that way. The first time you messaged me, I thought it must be a scam — until I Googled you and found proof you weren’t a scammer. So I do encourage everyone to do their checks before they trust someone.
Marc Babin: Good, I’m glad that comes across online. And again, the shift isn’t about abandoning your privacy instincts — that’s super important. It’s about being intentional instead of invisible. That’s a quote I love: be intentional instead of invisible. You don’t have to share your life. I’m very adamant about what I share and what I don’t — I keep a big part of my life private, my family, everything. What I put online is with intent.
You don’t have to perform if you don’t want to. But you can let people see how you think — your opinions on your industry, your take on a problem, the lessons from a project that didn’t go as planned. Those don’t have to be private. Don’t think of it as exposure; think of it as a conversation with someone, just at scale. So to those who grew up protecting their identity online, keeping their footprint as small as possible: you did that deliberately. Now shift your thinking — what you put online is with intent. You can’t build trust, which is the whole goal, by staying quiet. Looping back to noise: when feeds are full of noise, intent cuts through every single time. Content with intent, purpose, and authenticity cuts through. And that voids the whole privacy concern. You can still have your privacy — keep it — just portion it down.
Nune: I think the cliché “talk to one person” actually works. When I’m onboarding into a project and talking with future colleagues, I don’t share every detail of my personal life. I share part of my experience, the technical side, I make jokes sometimes that show my personality. If you think of it that way, you’re just doing the same thing — for hopefully a million people who’ll watch it. That framing helps. Another cliché is the “just start” quote that everyone says — start a podcast, start a post. I want to talk about the gap between that advice and the reality: the discomfort of just starting. How do you overcome that, and how do you help others overcome it?
Marc Babin: I credit most of my success to just starting. Like I said, I jump first and look second when it comes to content — that’s my personality. I’d rather make a mistake and learn how not to do it. That comes from my sports and athletics background. For people afraid to make that jump, the way to close the gap is to ask: what happens if you don’t? Don’t think about what happens if you start — think about what happens if you don’t. If you don’t, nothing changes. You won’t gain anything. You’ll fall further behind.
That’s what motivated me to start. You mentioned it in the intro — when I was at Marriott in the Caribbean, I didn’t want to do the content every other hotel was doing, because every other hotel was doing it. There was no fun in that. It’s boring, boxed, life in a box. I wanted to break the mold. I had an idea but no idea how to do it. I started a YouTube channel by literally buying a camera and a microphone, with zero experience — not a little, nothing. Nothing with editing, nothing at all. And I just accepted: the first ones won’t be great, but I’ll be proud of what I put out, I’ll enjoy it, and I’ll just start. Because if I didn’t start, nothing would have changed. So to keep it short for anyone facing the anxiety of starting: think about what happens if you don’t. It’s a much darker future.
Just start — like a walk
Nune: It’s funny you mention sports, because it’s a lot like sports. Doing a five-minute exercise a day is so much more than sitting on the couch. Same with content — one post is endlessly more than zero.
Marc Babin: Amazing metaphor. Exactly — start small, but be consistent. If you don’t want to start a podcast tomorrow, fine, that might be way too big a step. Just start by commenting on other people’s posts with your opinion: “I think this is really interesting, but here’s my perspective.” Just start doing something. Going for a 10-minute walk a day is better than not going for a 10-minute walk a day. It’s exactly the same thing.
Nune: And I don’t think you can walk the wrong way — just like you can’t express your opinion the wrong way. It’s your opinion.
Marc Babin: It’s your opinion, and that authenticity matters. You pick the fights you want to fight — maybe don’t go on the most aggressive tangents — but start small. Don’t go climb Everest on your first outing; go for a nice easy walk. Absorb, take the steps you’re comfortable with, but get comfortable with being uncomfortable. In sport, one of the most common phrases is: if you can do something easily, you’re not pushing yourself hard enough. Push yourself out of your comfort zone — that’s the only way we grow, the only way we learn. Why do you pick up a new textbook? To go outside your comfort zone. It’s the same concept. So find a way in your own mind to relate it to how you’ve broken through in your current career. How have you learned more? How have you pushed products in new ways? Did you try something that might fail? Just relate it to things you’ve already done.
The real root cause: visibility isn’t vanity
Nune: Let’s root cause this one last time. We talked about content noise, expert silence, the perfectionism trap, the trust problem, and — as cliché as it sounds — just starting and embracing the silence you’ll get at the beginning of your experiment. Anything else I’m missing for the root cause of experts being the most silent ones?
Marc Babin: I love that you framed it that way as a brand. The real root cause is that somewhere along the way, highly capable people learned to separate what they do from who they are — their expertise lives at work, in the room, in the decisions they make and the problems they solve. That’s where it’s always lived, and it’s always been enough, because the work spoke for itself. We’ve all been there. That’s all we had to do, because it filled the gap.
Putting it online feels different. It feels like claiming something — like saying “I have something worth hearing,” like trying to take attention away from something else. For someone who’s spent a career letting the results do the talking, that feels uncomfortably close to arrogance. So they stay quiet — because they’re busy, because they’re introverts, because visibility feels like vanity. And they were never in it for the vanity. They were in it for the work: head down, do the job.
The shift that actually changes things isn’t a content strategy. It’s a belief change — you asked earlier how to change that thinking. The moment someone genuinely accepts that their experience has value beyond the room they’re sitting in — that there’s someone out there right now who needs exactly what they know, and will never find it because they stay quiet — that’s when everything moves. Visibility isn’t vanity. Be really clear on that distinction. It’s generosity. I think that’s the reframe that unlocks a lot of people.
For me, when I made my first YouTube video — 2016, 2017, somewhere in that range, I’d have to check the page, it’s still live — I started it because I wanted to share the destination with people, more than to put myself on camera. I wanted people to see what I was seeing. It wasn’t about vanity, it was about generosity — people seeing that sunset at four or five in the morning, all the things I wanted them to see of the destination. That’s why I started podcasting too: I wanted to give voice to problems the real world was having. That unlocked it for me. So think about it as generosity — you giving your knowledge to other people. I think that can unlock a lot of people.
Visibility isn’t vanity. It’s generosity.
Nune: A lot of people like me feel that once you learn something, everybody already knows it — it’s obvious to everyone else. Which of course isn’t true. What clicked for me is something someone wrote: you are somebody’s step five. Someone’s just starting in IT, just learning what you do, and you’re their point B — that’s where they want to get. To those people, you’re saying something new. You’re sharing your knowledge, being a good peer. I think that matters.
Marc Babin: Sure — and the way you learned it is maybe different from how they will. I love that.
Nune: So if someone listening is finally convinced they need to start their podcast, what do they do — besides obviously getting in touch with you and The Podcast Blueprint? Is there a book? I’m a big book person, although you can’t read your way into creating something.
Marc Babin: Reading can actually detract — “let me read more, let me read that other book.” At some point you have to open the door and go for a walk. You can’t read your way into doing sports either; you can read about staying safe and how your body works, but at some point you just have to start.
That said, there are books I do like — especially about the psychology of people and reading body language, which helps a communicator. My favorite on that topic is from the 1950s: How to Read People Like a Book. It’s very short, super thin, written in the ‘50s, but it still applies perfectly today. I read it about once a month — it’s always a good pickup. So that’s a good one. But honestly, if you want to put your voice out there, think about what you know and how you want to tell it. Maybe podcasting isn’t the right format — I know it’s strong for a lot of topics and people, but start thinking about it, start absorbing your world, read a lot, comment on things, start conversations. That’ll teach you a lot about how you want to move forward. If you want to have the larger conversation, you need a strong foundation — and the stronger the foundation, the better the end result.
Nune: What also helped me was less reading, more writing — not necessarily writing and posting, but writing for yourself. Finding your voice, finding what you want to talk about, finding the key points you want to make. They’ll change, but that’s a starting point to form your content around.
Marc Babin: 100% agree.
A question for the next guest
Nune: Thanks a lot for being my first guest. As the first guest, you get to help me establish a tradition: every guest leaves a question for the next guest. You don’t know who it’s going to be, I don’t know who it’s going to be, but they’re going to receive your question.
Marc Babin: No pressure. What can I ask someone I have no connection to? Let me keep it on the theme we’ve been talking about today, and generic enough. Let’s go with: what did you learn this week that you didn’t share with others? There’s a little bit of thinking in there.
Nune: I love that. Thank you.