How to Prep for a Podcast Interview

By Junaid Ahmed

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I've recorded more than 700 episodes. I can tell you within the first five minutes whether a conversation is going to be good.

It has almost nothing to do with the microphone.

The flat interviews and the great ones use the same gear, the same software, the same room. The difference shows up earlier than the recording. It shows up in how I prepared for the person sitting across from me.

So when people ask me how to prepare for a podcast interview, I tell them the truth. The prep is not about you. It's about the guest.

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Early on, I thought prep meant getting my own house in order.

Check the levels. Test the connection. Have my intro ready. Make sure the recording light was on. All of that matters, and you should do it. But that's setup, not prep.

I'd sit down with someone fascinating and ask the same questions everyone else asked them. They'd give me the same answers they gave everyone else. Polished. Rehearsed. Dead.

The conversation was fine. Nobody remembered it. Including me.

The gear was never the problem.

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Now the first thing I do is research the guest like I actually care, because I do.

I read what they wrote. I listen to a couple of other shows they've been on. I look at what they're working on right now, not just the bio they sent me. I want to know the thing they keep coming back to when nobody's steering them.

Here's what I'm hunting for: the real story. The one underneath the official one.

Everybody has a version of themselves they hand to interviewers. The title, the company, the highlight reel. That's the surface. Somewhere under it is the moment they almost quit, the thing they believe that most people in their field don't, the part they don't usually get asked about.

That's the conversation worth recording. My whole job in prep is finding the door to it.

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Then I write questions. But not the way you'd think.

I don't write a script. I tried that. Over-scripting kills the thing you came for. You stop listening to the person because you're waiting to get to question seven. They can feel it. The whole thing turns into two people reading at each other.

But winging it completely doesn't work either, at least not for me. Without prep I default to the obvious questions, and the obvious questions get obvious answers.

So I land in the middle. I write maybe six or seven questions, and I treat them as doors, not a path. Each one is designed to open the person up, not to extract a fact.

"What did you believe ten years ago that you've since thrown out?" opens a person up. "When did you start the company?" does not.

I keep the questions in front of me. I plan to abandon most of them.

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The best moments in any episode I've recorded came from a follow-up, not a prepared question.

Someone says something half-interesting, and instead of moving on to my next item, I stop and say, "wait, say more about that." That's the whole trick. Prep is what gives me the freedom to do it. Because I already know where the conversation could go, I'm not afraid to chase a tangent. I know I can find my way back.

You can only follow the thread if you're not clutching a script.

Preparation is what lets you stop preparing once the recording starts.

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I also do a pre-call when I can, even a short one.

Ten minutes. No recording. I'm not trying to have the interview early. I'm trying to find out what they're excited to talk about and what they'd rather skip. People relax once they know you're not there to ambush them. By the time we actually record, we're not strangers anymore.

That pre-call has saved more episodes than any piece of equipment I own.

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And I send the guest something ahead of time.

Not a script. Not the exact questions, because then they rehearse and you lose the spark. I send them the themes. The general territory we'll cover. What I'm hoping to dig into. Enough that they show up ready, not enough that they show up canned.

I also send the boring but kind things. When we're recording. How long it'll run. What happens after. Whether they'll get the clips. The stuff that tells a guest you've done this before and they're in good hands.

A guest who feels prepared and respected gives you a better conversation. Every time.

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So here's the honest version of how to prep for a podcast interview.

Research the guest until you find the real story. Write a handful of questions that open people up, then be willing to abandon them. Do a pre-call. Send the guest the themes and the logistics, not a script. Then sit down and actually listen.

None of that is about your microphone. All of it is about the person.

The gear records the conversation. The prep is what makes the conversation worth recording.

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The hard part isn't doing this once. It's doing it for guest number forty when you're tired and three episodes behind. That's the part I kept dropping, so I built something to hold it: the research, the prep notes, the pre-call, the themes I sent, all kept with the guest instead of scattered across my desktop. That's a piece of what PodGlue does. It's in beta now at podglue.com/join.

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Junaid Ahmed is the host of Hacks and Hobbies and the founder of PodGlue. He's prepped for more than 700 conversations and learned most of this the hard way.