The Conversation Lab Podcast is a podcast about the power of conversation, told through conversations with people who live close to it every day. Each episode features a candid discussion with an expert from an adjacent field - design, research, psychology, community, leadership, writing, or systems thinking - exploring how conversation actually works in their world and what the rest of us can learn from it. This isn’t an interview show chasing soundbites or hot takes. It’s a slower, thoughtful exchange focused on how listening, framing, silence, and trust shape outcomes, and how better conversations lead to better decisions.
Dr. Korey Watkins is a clinical psychologist in Austin, and he has spent more than 15 years doing work where the conversation is the whole job. In this episode, Korey and Jake talk about what it really takes to be present with another person, why silence can be the most powerful thing you say, and how to walk into a hard conversation without dreading it.
You will hear how Korey built his conversation skills on purpose, why he treats every talk as two people sharing a moment, and the simple model he created for the hardest conversations of all. Whether you are a therapist, a product leader, or a parent, the lessons here carry over to any conversation that matters.
In this episode
How Korey learned conversation skills, and why he was not just born good at it
The grad school habit of saying hi to strangers to build his confidence
Why he once sat in silence with a patient for half an hour, and what she remembered most
Conversation as relationship, not a list of questions to get answered
How to share part of yourself while still holding clear boundaries
A fresh way to think about conflict so you stop avoiding hard talks
The trap of "one way is good, one way is bad," and why your style is your strength
The CLEAR model from Korey's upcoming book, and how it works even for tough customer conversations
About the guest
Dr. Korey Watkins is a clinical psychologist based in Austin, Texas. He works at the VA, serves in the US Army Reserve, and runs a private practice on the south side of Austin. He is also writing a book called How to Tell Them, about talking to children and teens through life's hardest moments.
Find Korey here:
Website: https://www.drkoreylwatkins.com/ (https://www.drkoreylwatkins.com/)
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/drkoreylwatkins/ (https://www.instagram.com/drkoreylwatkins/)
Stay connected
If you enjoyed this episode, share it with a friend or two. It is a huge help for a new podcast.
Join the Conversation Lab, my free monthly event. Sign up at jakemckee.com/conversationlab (http://jakemckee.com/conversationlab).
22 Jun 2026
Conversation Lab: Terry Miesle - S1E13
Master Flavorist Terry Miesle has spent thirty five years building the flavors you taste in meats, snacks, and dairy. Jake sat down with him to talk about why the hardest part of the job isn't the lab work, it's the conversation. They get into turning a vague request like "a little more orangey" into a finished flavor, building a shared language so a team stops describing the same smell five different ways, knowing when good enough is good enough, and why so much of flavor lives in memory and association rather than just your mouth. If you build products or lead a team, the work will sound familiar.
Terry is on the North American savory flavor team at Sensient: https://sensientflavorsandextracts.com/ (https://sensientflavorsandextracts.com/).
You can find him on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/terrymiesle/ (https://www.linkedin.com/in/terrymiesle/)
Find out more about Jake and the Conversation Compass at: https://jakemckee.com/ (https://jakemckee.com/)
Signup for Conversation Lab event: https://jakemckee.com/conversationlab (https://jakemckee.com/conversationlab)
8 Jun 2026
Conversation Lab: Erik Summa - S1E12
The customer's actual words and daily reality are often lost in translation on product teams. In Episode 12, host Jake McKee talks with UX and AI design consultant Erik Summa (formerly of Dell), whose job is to bring the absent user into the room and keep them there.1 (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1zXfxVls6z5PpVNIReuuKAvGEg5k-7T-oiFeWKY-Om9Y/edit)
The central question: What happens to that essential user-focused work when AI speeds up development so much that teams skip past the step of truly understanding who they're building for?1 (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1zXfxVls6z5PpVNIReuuKAvGEg5k-7T-oiFeWKY-Om9Y/edit)
Listen as Erik explains why the value of a project was never in its speed, but in the human connection. We dive into topics like "vibe coding," talking to AI in the car, and the irreplaceable human moment of an older patient whose call to the dentist might be their only real conversation all week. Ultimately, you must speed up the parts of a project that can be rushed so you can slow down on the parts that can't—and the one part that can never be rushed is understanding who you are building for.
For more information about the Conversation Compass, head to https://jakemckee.com/ (https://jakemckee.com/)
And if you'd like to signup for Conversation Lab, you can at: https://jakemckee.com/conversationlab (https://jakemckee.com/conversationlab)
Episode 11 focuses on Conversation Traction, the fifth and final pillar of the Customer Conversation Compass, which serves as the ultimate test of whether customer conversations actually lead to organizational change.
For more information about the Conversation Compass, head to https://jakemckee.com/ (https://jakemckee.com/)
And if you'd like to signup for Conversation Lab, you can at: https://jakemckee.com/conversationlab (https://jakemckee.com/conversationlab)
25 May 2026
Conversation Lab: Josh Zerkel - S1E10
Josh Zerkel has spent 20 years building brand communities at companies like Asana, Evernote, and CBS News. He just published a book called The Community Code. And his argument is one that a lot of community professionals have been trying to make for a long time: community isn't a support deflection tool. It's a go-to-market engine, and most organizations have no idea how to treat it like one.
In this episode, Jake and Josh talk about why community keeps getting stuck in the "nice to have" bucket, how to speak about community impact in the language the rest of the business actually uses, and why showing confidence in your work is more effective than drowning stakeholders in metrics.
Find more about Josh:
Book: https://www.amazon.com/Community-Code-Strengthening-Go-Market-ebook/dp/B0GNJBXCPR (https://www.amazon.com/Community-Code-Strengthening-Go-Market-ebook/dp/B0GNJBXCPR)
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshuazerkel/ (https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshuazerkel/)
Substack: thecommunitycode.substack.com (http://thecommunitycode.substack.com)
Most product teams have one or two people who actually talk to customers. Everyone else makes decisions based on a summary of what those people heard. The problem is that a summary of a conversation is not the conversation. Tone disappears. Specifics get flattened. Surprises get buried. What's left mostly confirms whatever the team already believed.
In this solo exploration episode, Jake walks through the fourth pillar of the Customer Conversation Compass: Conversation Amplification. That means getting the real customer voice, not a cleaned-up version of it, to the people inside your organization who need to hear it most. Jake covers the five blockers that stop insight from spreading internally and what to do about each one.
Find out more about Jake's work with the Conversation Compass at: jakemckee.com
7 May 2026
Conversation Lab: Lee LeFever - S1E8
Lee LeFever started Common Craft back in 2003 with a simple idea: technology only spreads as far as people can understand it. His "In Plain English" videos broke down everything from RSS to Twitter using paper cutouts, hand-drawn art, and a whiteboard that lived on the floor of his house. Millions of people watched. Educators licensed them. A whole genre of explainer videos grew up around what Lee was doing.
In this episode, Jake and Lee go back about 20 years to talk about how it all started, why simple beat slick, and what it taught Lee about explanation as a real skill people can learn.
Find out more about Lee at https://commoncraft.com (https://commoncraft.com)
Find out more about Jake and the Customer Conversation Compass at: https://jakemckee.com/ (https://jakemckee.com/)
In this episode, Jake tells the story of the night a whiskey cart rolled into his private dining room at Eleven Madison Park. The staff caught a throwaway joke he made and acted on it. That single moment captures everything Conversation Tuning is about.
This is pillar three of the Customer Conversation Compass. It's the skill of asking questions that actually get you the truth instead of the answer your customer thinks you want to hear.
Jake walks through the three biggest traps that wreck customer conversations, plus a quick pre-flight check you can run on your questions before any customer call.
For more information on the Conversation Compass, visit https://jakemckee.com
13 Apr 2026
Conversation Lab: Larry Glickman S1E6
Most people think a conversation starts when someone opens their mouth. It doesn't. It starts long before that, when the other person trusts you enough to say something real.
Larry Glickman is the founder of JCAT Partners, where he trains law enforcement and private security professionals to work more effectively with the Jewish community. His program isn't a checklist. It's a foundation. Before anyone can have a quality conversation, they need to understand the language, rituals, and cultural context of the people they're working with. Without that, what you get isn't a real conversation. You get surface-level compliance and a lot of missed signals.
In this episode, Larry and Jake dig into what it takes to build the conditions for honest conversation, and why product teams skip this step more than they realize.
More information at: https://compass.jakemckee.com
In this solo episode, Jake introduces the second pillar of the Customer Conversation Compass: Conversation Architecture. He opens with a real story about a virtual support group for parents of kids in a mental health crisis, and what happens when the organization running it never bothered to design the space.
Jake breaks down the seven dimensions of Conversation Architecture, the intentional design work that happens before anyone says a word.
Find out more about the Conversation Compass at: https://compass.jakemckee.com
25 Mar 2026
Conversation Lab: Martin Drayton - S1E4
What if the best training ground for customer conversations is in a plane at 35,000 feet, or a beginner ski slope at 7am?
Martin Drayton has spent decades reading strangers fast and figuring out how to reach them. As a flight attendant and snowboard instructor, that's the whole job.
Today we talk about what that actually looks like and what product teams can steal from it.
Find out more about Martin at:
https://www.instagram.com/emdee_scale_models/ (https://www.instagram.com/emdee_scale_models/)
https://youtube.com/@emdeescalemodels (https://youtube.com/@emdeescalemodels)
https://www.facebook.com/MartinBuildsModels (https://www.facebook.com/MartinBuildsModels)
More information on conversation design at:
https://jakemckee.com/compass (https://jakemckee.com/compass)
Most product teams believe they understand their customers. They have NPS scores, research decks, and Slack channels full of feedback snippets. What they often don't have is an actual conversation.
In this Exploration episode, I dig into Conversation Debt: the accumulated cost of conversations that never happened. We cover what real customer conversation actually is, how debt accumulates through layers of secondhand insight, and why AI tools are making this problem faster and harder to see at the same time.
One stat that tends to land hard: 80% of executives believe their company delivers a superior customer experience. 8%of customers agree.
That gap has a name. And it's fixable.
Take the free Conversation Debt Assessment at jakemckee.com/compass (http://jakemckee.com/compass).
16 Mar 2026
Conversation Lab: William Marks - S1E2
In this first interview episode of the Conversation Lab Podcast, Jake McKee sits down with William Marks, a Navy veteran, former Pentagon spokesman, and congressional candidate in Washington State, to explore what happens when the people responsible for communication stop talking only to the people who already speak their language. William's career has put him in some of the highest-stakes conversation environments imaginable: military briefings, CNN studios, political campaigns in deeply unfriendly territory. What emerges from the conversation is a through-line most product leaders will recognize, the gap between curated, institutional messaging and the kind of unfiltered human exchange that actually changes minds. Along the way they dig into what the Navy learned about communication after Vietnam, why over-engineering a conversation before you have it is what kills it, how a self-described introvert ended up as a Pentagon spokesman, and why one good conversation is never enough if the system around it doesn't change.
More information: https://jakemckee.com/podcast (https://jakemckee.com/)
16 Mar 2026
Conversation Lab Introduction - S1E1
In this first episode of the Conversation Lab Podcast, host Jake McKee introduces himself, the show, and the framework behind his consulting work — the Customer Conversation Compass. Jake draws on 25+ years of customer engagement experience, including building one of the most ambitious fan community programs at LEGO, to make the case that most product teams have lost direct contact with the people they serve, not because they're lazy, but because they've built a system that filters, summarizes, and sanitizes the customer voice until it's barely recognizable. He calls this Conversation Debt, and it's the enemy at the center of everything he does. The Conversation Compass, a five-pillar conversation design framework, is his answer. The podcast, he explains, will bring in voices from well outside the product world: therapists, journalists, negotiators, improvisers, researchers, and others who have spent careers thinking hard about what makes conversation work and what kills it, with the goal of giving product teams a richer, more practical toolkit for the conversations that actually matter.
More information at: https://jakemckee.com/podcast (https://jakemckee.com/podcast)
3 Mar 2026
Conversation Lab Podcast: Season 1 Trailer
The Conversation Lab Podcast explores how better dialogue leads to better decisions, stronger products, and clearer thinking. Hosted by me (Jake McKee), this podcast goes beyond surface-level interviews and digs into the moments where insight is created in real time.
This episode is a pre-launch trailer, briefly sharing some details about what the show will be and what to expect.
If you care about building things that matter, listening well, and avoiding secondhand insight, you’re in the right place.
Reach and audience
Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.
Apple Podcasts (US)
5.0 / 5
1 ratings
Contact Conversation Lab Podcast
Guest appearances
Books guests
Based on episode analysis; this does not confirm that the show is currently accepting guests.
Host of Conversation Lab Podcast?
Claim your podcast to manage its listing and keep your show details accurate.
Pod Engine is an independent podcast discovery and analytics service and is not affiliated with or endorsed by this podcast. Artwork and show content belong to their owners. Full legal notice.
Explore this show Podcast research with Pod Engine
