Hobby Horse

Interviews that go elsewhere

Lessons from week 2

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My big takeaways this week are:

  • Being incredibly familiar with a guest means I tend to talk over or interrupt them a lot because we have a long-standing connection. I'm going to have to remind myself to step away slightly to let them answer things even if it means moving on and missing a question
  • I should probably have a list of questions. I've completed four interviews so far and most of them I was just winging it, but I'm realizing good questions thought up days before are vital to getting more of a story. Ideally in the moment, you can tweak your next question if something comes up, but it's good to have them as a fallback.
  • My eventual target is 20-30min for interviews, but even when they're scheduled as such we tend to naturally go for an hour. I'm going to have to think of shortcuts to get through introductions faster and get through questions and into deeper questions more quickly. I don't necessarily want to have a 45min long podcast, that's asking a lot from an audience.
  • After every interview, I'm kicking myself for not asking at least one or two questions that come to mind right after we end. I think that's a good sign that I've still got a ways to go but I hope it's not a long-term problem.
  • A couple of the upcoming interviews have a visual component, where we're describing a video or a photo or objects, and I'm going to have to figure out how to accommodate those kinds of stories. Put lots of images in the show notes? Should I try chapter marker images in Forcast? I need to figure it out.
  • I hate it when my podcast app goes dark at the tail end of the week. No one releases podcasts on weekends, even though I tend to do a lot of driving and churning through podcasts on weekends, so I'm going to try and stick to releasing new episodes on weekends so there's something new for people then.