Hishem Azzouz sends guests the opening question days ahead so they can prepare, then does a pre-recording call to discuss it and ease them in. This prevents awkward silences and scripted answers, letting the conversation feel natural instead.
Chapters
So I know how I'm gonna prepare for my podcast, but how am I gonna make sure that the guests feel prepared and they know what to expect? So I now need to do my research into how am I going to prepare my guests on my podcast And some of these people have probably never been on a podcast before, and I've never hosted one. So I wanted to make sure that I was prepared, or I did, did obviously some research into it. So I ended up in the same place, and that was Tim Ferriss's podcast, where the exact same episode. And again, there was some— there was two really important things which I'm going to be doing to make sure that I prepare my guests appropriately and use these techniques. So the first thing is I'm going to send the person that I'm going to be getting on my podcast the very first question that I'm going to ask. Why do I do that? So I'm going to be doing that because the guest could potentially come on the podcast or anticipate the conversation and think, oh, what is going to be the first question? He might stump me, I'm not sure, etc. And that just takes that away straight away. So I'll be sending them the actual question itself, the very first one, so they can get a bit of time in terms of what they want to share, what their answer is going to be. And I'll probably do that a couple of days before the actual podcast recording and/or a week before the podcast recording as well. So that'll be the first thing that I'll do. And I think also, just to add to that, is that it will allow the conversation to go into a natural flow because we'll go from one question which they would have thought about into the next question and so on. Secondly, Before we actually do the recording, I'm going to give the person a quick call. So I'm gonna give them a call and we're gonna have a bit of a chat, talk about what the first question's gonna be again, maybe discuss what they're thinking about saying. I'll say, do you know what you wanna sort of talk about yourself in the podcast? Is there anything you wanna go through? Just again, just to make them feel a bit at ease and just to encourage that sort of natural state of conversation because that's obviously what I'm going to be aiming for with the people that I get on my show. I don't want it to be sort of scripted or anything like that. So 2 things which I'm going to be doing to prepare my guests on my podcast is send them the actual first question that I'm going to ask a week or a couple of days before the actual podcast. And secondly, give them a quick call before we actually do the recording and have a 5-minute conversation just to make them feel relaxed and us having a a bit of a conversation.
