What makes an interview podcast good or great?
marginalrevolution.com
marginalrevolution.com
Four things I do with every guest
1) Do real research. Read any other interviews this person has given. It helps you avoid the dumb questions and sparks new ideas.
2) Try to figure out what this person really wants to talk about but never gets asked about. Founders usually have some passion related to, but not really part of, their startup story. I don't always hit tis, but when I do, it's a magical conversation.
3) Challenge your guest. If they say something that seems too fluffy or hyped. Push back and ask them (very politely) to support it.
4) Sketch out the conversation arc beforehand. Know the story you want to tell. The interview will be a series of having the guest go off on interesting tangents, and you pulling them back onto the storyline.
I don't know if my podcast interview skills count as "great" or even "good". But that's the way I approach it.
Joe Rogan has entered the chat.
- Lex’s weird comments and massive oversimplification of ethical topics. He always seems to ask people if X is Good or Evil, with no consideration of nuance. I get that he’s a computer scientist and not a ethicist, but I somewhat expected more.
- He doesn’t question the guest or curate the discussion very well. Some of the episodes are 3, 4, 5 hours long, which is madness. I want to listen to his guests, but I can’t spend 5 hours on a conversation that has an hour of insight. This is the job of a good host.
Overall the strength of his podcast comes from the quality of guests. I wish he would take his role as journalist/interviewer a little more seriously.
-unnuanced prompts/questions tend to trigger better responses. highly nuanced questions don't. it's up to the answerer to freely craft their response w/ little cognitive load or host-assumptions to manage.
-some of the longer podcasts are where the veil of persona disappears & one can see the authentic guest. I like long, deep, authentic conversations personally.
And to add more to your second point: Lex is catering to people who want long form interviews. There are thousands of other podcasts that fit the interview to the time rather than fit the time to the interview for those that don't like this.
- Long is not equal to deep. There is a lot of empty filler content that isn’t authentic or relevant.
You see, for me this is almost always the stuff I don't care about. It almost always ends up either rambling personal anecdotes and the two of them sharing 'funny' stories or two people pontificating on subjects way outside their areas of expertise. Both of which are completely uninteresting to me.
Two blokes chatting bollocks about stuff they don't really understand is only fun if I'm one of them.
I'm not even in the efficiency "play it at 2x" camp. But I pretty much have zero interest in hearing two or more people randomly ramble on. The fact that NPR/NPR-like podcasts and radio shows tend to have segments on even 1 hour shows probably says something about what pros find works best.
(I'm also a fan of shorter conference presentations although at large conferences, I appreciate that there are logistical issues associated with moving people between rooms too frequently.)
I really don't know how he managed to get the selection of guests that he's had especially in the early days of the podcast.
The guests themselves make value judgments of whether this polite, motivated, knowledgeable, reasonably boring guy with a sizeable audience and good credentials can help them to spread their own messages without much journalistic pushback.
His audio quality is also not bad.
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Personal opinion: The interviews are far too long. I'd like an informed opinion of the best (as opposed to most famous or controversial or odd) guests. If a biology expert told me Lex's interview with Eric Lander was a Must Listen, I'd value that more than, "oh! It's three hours of Elon Musk, but his personal values are well-known and haven't changed."
I would listen to a few very interesting conversations unedited OR a larger collection of reasonably interesting, short, heavily curated conversations. I enjoy hearing about subjects I normally don't encounter, and some of his guests bring this experience. Listening to months of audio to find these gems is not for me.
I prefer a small group of podcasts that have shorter episodes, entertaining/engaging hosts, interesting guests,
I do sometimes have longer podcast conversations with people I know well but 20-30 minutes feels like the natural sweet spot for my typical interview.
For the later guests who were not colleagues at MIT or his previous contract work at Google, they do what many guests do: they look at the interviewer's previous episodes and see if they like his style. It's a big commitment to spend ~3 hours with someone they don't know so they use the previous episodes as a "résumé" to see if it's worth their time.
>, not following up on what the guests says
And the parent comment you replied to said the opposite: >Lex will often say something like "oh that's interesting, let's talk about that"
Not debating you but it's an interesting observation to me that different people will see contradictory evidence.
>, reading from a list of prepared questions
The way a lot of these podcasts' preparations work behind-the-scenes with emails/phone calls before the actual interview is that the interviewer will propose a list of topics to talk about. The guest can also add (or subtract) from the list of topics because they are the ones who ultimately agree whether to appear on the podcast at all.
Therefore, using prepared questions is actually respecting the guest's agreement to be interviewed.
Now, if on the other hand you're complaining about the delivery of the prepared questions... such as "Lex should memorize the 50 prepared questions perfectly instead of reading a sheet of paper in front of him" or "Lex should use a cue card or teleprompter off camera to read the prepared question" ... it seems like a really trivial thing to complain about.
Unless you have some inside information, you can't know that this is the case. I find it difficult to believe given that some of his early guests are
Steven Pinker - episode 3
Guido van Rossum - episode 6
Eric Schmidt - episode 8
Elon Musk - episode 18
It's naive to think that you get a retired-Google-CEO-billionare by cold calling and getting him to review and like the first 7 episodes of your newly started podcast.
Hey, you cut out the quote where I conditionally qualified my statement with "later guests who were not colleagues at MIT or his previous contract work at Google,".
Anyway, it seems reasonable to presume that his connections at Google went up the chain and reached Eric Schmidt. So it wouldn't have been a true cold call.
He said Elon Musk happened because his A.I. research on Tesla self-driving was already seen by Elon.
Some of the early guests who were professors via his MIT connections. Some guests (especially physicists) might have been connections with his dad who is a physics professor. His older brother runs a biotech company so that may also spur some introductions.
With "6-degrees-of-separation" being what it is, what looks like a cold-call to outsiders ("how did he get Eric Schmidt?!?") could have actually been a friend-of-a-friend or colleague-of-a-colleague. I'm a nobody and I happen to know the billionaire fund manager and owner of a major sports team. With 3-degrees of separation with various past co-workers, I can connect the dots to several CEOs of major corporations. That doesn't mean they'd agree to be on my hypothetical podcast if I asked them but if a few of them said "yes", some viewers would wonder, "how did he manage to get X with a cold call?" -- The answer is that my extended social graph is invisible to viewers and it really wasn't a cold call.
Examples of "later" guests that are more "cold calls" with no help from MIT/Google were Dan Carlin (Hardcore History) and some of the female guests who weren't scientists. This isn't speculation because the guests themselves said they looked at Lex's previous podcasts to see his work.
In general, the playbook for a new podcaster (with no audience of millions yet) to get guests follows a similar trajectory:
1) Start with personal connections to build a body of work. Cold-calling famous people won't work at this early stage because they don't have any prior work to see to if it's worth their time.
2) The previous podcasts episodes can start to act as a résumé so host doesn't have to rely on personal connections. The ever-increasing audience numbers also pads the résumé and adds credibility to the interviewer.
3) The transition eventually happens where interviewer can get new guests based on reputation more than personal connections.
So what do you think that means in a deep, pilosophical way-of-life way?
"The meaning of life" is an ok question, but asking every interviewee about aliens and sci-fi technology, regardless of background, is getting repetitive. It doesn't seem to really give you, or the audience much to work with, and basically encourages the interviewee to spout off random stuff.
Now, the Jim Keller interview, that was good stuff because Jim Keller is an interesting person and a good people manager.
His guest list is impressive.
The topics range from interesting to overhyped (bitcoin/crypto).
Lex's own problems start with his voice: he sounds drugged, slurred, and frankly somewhat dim, the last impression strongly reinforced by his questions and follow-up.
The episodes themselves run too long, and would benefit greatly in my view by much tighter editing. Aiming for a set length (20, 30, or 60 minutes, say), going over that in the interview, and editing down, would be a vast improvement.
(Incidentally, I just found this article on the blog which suggests a set of guidelines for asking high quality questions. [1])
However, the issue I take with his interviews is that, because the questions are often pre-meditated, the conversation oftentimes fails to flow smoothly as tangential questions follow an interviewee's answer. It sometimes feels more of a Q&A than a conversation.
[1] https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/06/ho...
The lack of flow is actually part of Tyler's personality -- I've followed him for years and watched interviews with him. He has a very "economical" style of communication. One of his greatest gifts is that he can answer questions extemporaneously without pausing, with no umms or ahs, and definitely no pleasantries though that doesn't make him unpleasant, merely efficient. Despite that he does still comes across as kind of avuncular and soft.
I actually like that his main questions are pre-meditated and that he isn't afraid to switch topics abruptly. This way he manages to cover a huge span of topics rather than letting the interviewee go down rabbit holes. He packs a lot of insightful content into his podcasts with a minimal of pleasantries. He doesn't waste time dwelling on things.
He often says of his conversations that they are the conversations that "he wants to have, not the one you want to have". And I have to hand it to him, his questions are often way more insightful and high quality than the ones us mortals would ever come up with. He does put in a lot of work though -- in a behind-the-scenes episode, he mentions that he preps for 2 weeks before each interview, and actually reads the interviewee's works and other works related to the topic. He's so thorough that he's even impressed Nassim Taleb.
I've learned so much over the years from the Conversations with Tyler podcast.
But so subjective. Personally, I usually can't stand Terry Gross and I've heard many say she's one of the best. I really liked some of Joe Rogan's interviews, but others are train wrecks.
Though I don't like the Guest of the Week format, I recognize the skills of Terry Gross and others, for their medium.
The phases of experimentation and retrenchment are cyclic. Like all other mediums. The hotness in podcasting will spasm back and forth between indies and studios.
The plusses as I see them are:
- Fantastic range of material. She covers arts & culture, news and politics, world events, and science. I strongly suspect the show's staff has a lot to do with this.
- The intereviewer (not always Gross --- Dave Davies stands in fairly frequently and occasionally others) mostly get out of the way of the guest, though Gross herself is known for her five-minute-wind-up question. OK, it's not five minutes, but there's usually a question or two in the show that has a very long preamble.
- The interviews are edited. Not heavily, but just enough to fit format, for continuity, and relevance. This virtually always helps, and most especially avoids all of the live-on-air annoyances of technical glitches and rushing the guest at the end of the time window.
I see these as strong positives.
Gross's voice and intonation may strike people differently. I appreciate the non-shrill, calm manner (most commercial broadcast feels like people screaming or shouting, by contrast). It's instantly soothing. Her politics are clearly left/liberal, though she does try to get out of her comfort zone occasionally, and when she does so the results are far more equitable than what I see with leading interviewers from the right. Most notably Bill O'Reilly, though also Kiss lead man Gene Simmons, off the top of my head. (I heard both when originally aired.)
The format is not especially combative, though Gross will dig gently on occasion. (Contrast, say, Bob Garfield's hard press on occasion, notably an oil-industry apologist and Internet revenge-porn hoster. Even there, Garfield isn't aggressive, but he's very clearly assertive and making his views clear.)
The high consistency of interviews regardless of host is what makes me feel that there's probably a lot of teamwork involved. Gross is pretty good in arts and culture issues, but weaker on technology and science. Despite that, the science and technology interviews still tend to be pretty good, especially in a general-audience venue.
What becomes clear is that Gross has her own favourites and crushes. Some are somewhat surprising (Johnny Cash), others more predictable though understandable and reciprocated --- Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart especially, occasionally other public media names such as This American Life's Ira Glass. Again I find this endearing.
- Research has been done on the guest, their work, the subject, etc.
- The interviewer asks interesting questions that the guest likely hadn't heard before. For instance, I'd much rather hear about something very specific versus something like, "What was your audition for Killing Eve like?" The latter's probably been asked dozens of times, and I'll bet that the guest's sick of hearing it.
- The interviewer asks their questions but gives the interviewee enough room to answer without interruption. While it's good to find a balance between an interview and a conversation, I think, I can't stand it when the interviewer interrupts.
- Simply put, the interview is the focus. I stopped listening to a knowledge-based podcast because the host interrupted the interview with "fun fact about [Subject]" segues. They were edited in after the interview happened, but it frustrated me because I was way more interested in hearing the guest speak.
How i built this is an excellent podcast full of VERY interesting stories and hes had big names on it.
This episode was rock solid.
The biggest takeaway for me was: make the interviewee feel comfortable by letting them talk freely about subjects they feel passionate about, and the interviewer should ask genuine and good questions by properly researching the interviewee beforehand.
Extra credit each for episode number, show URL, guest names, topics, sponsors, sponsor URLs.
None have the date indicated, either recording or air.
Their a pretty fascinating cross-section of history, but the task of identifying when and who each recording concerns is tedious.
The total set does correspond to a publicly-accessible interface, though that itself only provides access to a small subset of the total archive. (Likely because the hosting organisation is itself trying to identify and date the segments.)
I can understand how early in the project this might have been acceptable, but after a decade or five, you'd think the host or producers might have had the inspiration to clearly identify their work.
"Hello, I'm X, it's DATE, this is PROGRAM, and I'm talking today to GUEST(S)".
On the Media ran a segment a few years back (2007) on the practice, and product, of audio editing:
https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/segments/129437-pul... (transcript available, click to view)
audio: https://pdst.fm/e/www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/audio.wny...
The roll the tape and broadcast everything school makes for terrible audio, with very few exceptions.
Editing should be for tics, extraneous discussion, flow, etc. No, don't pull a Project Veritas and make people say the opposite of what they did, but do get to the damned point.
I think it may have been This American Life (or some similar aughts-era narrative programmes) which published some really good guidelines on doing your own audio editing. I'll see if I can turn up something (though a quick scan seems to show a lot of similar guides and now, university coursework).
Updates:
There's a more recent guide (2018) from KQED-FM here: https://www.npr.org/2018/11/15/662070097/starting-your-podca... That covers far more than just audio editing, though it points here for specifics: https://training.npr.org/2018/10/31/mixing-diy/
Also not what I'd had in mind originally but a pretty good guide, here: https://medium.com/@ranlevi/the-importance-of-editing-to-you...
Ahhh and they mention EconTalk at the start. I think its time to dive into my past haha