TJ Walker (YouTube, July 2, 2024) gives practical guidance for hosts conducting interviews on podcasts or video platforms. He organizes the talk around three core principles—deep preparation, active listening (despite technical distractions), and prioritizing audience engagement—and illustrates each with examples and dos/don'ts for host behavior.
What do you do if you've got an interview coming up, only you're not receiving the questions. You have to ask the questions. That's right. You now have a podcast. You're now doing an interview show for YouTube or TikTok or some other social media platform. You've got a guest, you're excited, but you don't have a lot of experience of this. How do you really come across as professional? Well, keep in mind these three key things. Number one, preparation. It's not enough to just read a press release or spend 20 seconds looking at their bio on their website. Try to read as much as you possibly can about your guest. Yes, check out their websites, check out their press releases, go to their social media, but also Google. Search them, check them in Google News, see what other people are saying about them in mainstream media and in social media, really prepare. Try to find out what is in fact unique about your guest. What's special that this person has that's going to be of unique interest to your audience. So really dive deep. If they have a book, guess what? Read the book. If they have a lot of books, read as many as you can. Now, we can't interview Isaac Asimov anymore, so you're not going to have to read 500 books. But if it's an author you truly respect, go deeper. Don't read just a summary of their latest book. The next thing you've really got to think about is how to listen more effectively in the interview. And I mean active listening. Now, this is difficult when you are doing a podcast interview, especially if it's video. It's a video podcast or YouTube live or Facebook Live or any of that. You may be in charge of the technology. You're trying to push buttons, you're trying to push the keyboard. You may be changing different camera angles and trying to figure out, is this the best camera angle? Is this the best camera angle? Is this the best camera angle? You may be looking at audio levels, you may be monitoring comments coming in. You may have a private chat. All of it's important. But guess what? If you're not really paying attention to what your guest is saying, it's not going to be a good interview. Because so often if you ask the right questions and then just listen, the person you're talking to will say something revealing, interesting, maybe surprising, maybe shocking. If you're so focused on the technology and trying to get the right button and what's the next ad and where are we going to go here? You're going to miss it. And because of that, your interview will come across as rote, as mechanical, like someone who just read through a list of questions. You're going to sound like a robot, and that is not what anyone wants to listen to. So you're going to have to somehow get comfortable enough with all the technology or have other people try to help you or just realize, okay, maybe I'm going to miss a comment. Truly, truly listen to what your guest is saying, because you want to really have an antenna for anything that's interesting or confusing. If your guest is saying something confusing to you, well, guess who else it might be confusing to your audience. You need to follow up. Your guest might be a great communicator, but they might use acronyms or initials and you don't know what it stands for. Ama? Is that the American Medical Association? Is that the American Management Association? Turns out there are a lot of organizations that have the initials ama. Don't be afraid to ask your guest exactly what it stands for. That's going to make it more interesting and more powerful. So you've got to actively listen. The other thing is, so many great guests have been on a million talk shows. If they get the sense you're phoning it in and you're not really listening to them, guess what? They will do the same thing to you. They'll give you the same boilerplate stories, examples they've said a million times. They might even sound bored. So you gotta give deeper, deeper context by asking deeper questions. So the second big thing you've really got to focus on is this active, active listening. The third thing you've got to do is focus on true engagement. How can you make this content as engaging as possible for your audience? If you're doing it live, then by all means ask them their questions. Ask them to join, ask them to participate, crowdsource the questions. You're not the only person who can ask good questions. If it's not live, that's okay. Make sure everything you ask is going to be interesting to the audience. Now, it's fine for you to share some of your own personality, but some hosts go too far. They talk about themselves so much that the guest hardly gets a word in edgewise. Your audience wants to hear from your guests. They like new viewpoints. As much as people love Tim Ferriss and his books the Four Hour Work Week and the Four Hour Body. On all of those, he knows when he has a guest on, if he has Arnold Schwarzenegger on, people really want to hear from Arnold Schwarzenegger. So, yes, Tim will still share examples and anecdotes from his life, but the vast majority of the time is devoted to his guest, in this case Arnold Schwarzenegger, talking about his life, his stories, his principles to live by that can be meaningful and interesting to the audience. So keep in mind this final tip. Everything you do in the show, in the interview, needs to be looked at through the lens of does this benefit my audience? Is this information going to be interesting to them, or useful to them, or entertaining to them? Or all three? If you focus on these three key principles for your next interview, you will do a fantastic job as a talk show host, as a podcast host. Good luck.
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