Lessons
Lesson Info
Researching the Guest
I've got a full kit of tools to help reach out and book guests. And you do too now. With all the Meistertask and the ScheduleOnce and all the workflows. The next step is preparing for your interviews, and this is extremely important. I will read a book cover to cover. Most people will never do that. The cover to cover is important because sometimes the dedication. You'll be reading a book about a business owner and everyone's like, Oh, great. You started this great coffee chain. And now you're really wealthy and well off. Who knew? Coffee, right? But the dedication says to my adoptive parents who rescued me from child soldier life in Africa. And you're like, wait a minute. What? I'm gonna talk about that. Forget coffee beans for now. And then you get this great story that nobody else got because that was in the dedication that everybody else skipped because it wasn't in the cheat sheet his publicist gave to everybody who got free copy of the book that never got opened. So read the book...
cover to cover. Don't have an assistant do it. I know it's tempting to be like, "I have my VA reading these books. "Or I downloaded a summary." Summaries are not designed for what you're doing. They're designed for the business executive to go, Yeah, I read that book. I got the five points that were necessary from it. And done. You're looking for the story. We're storytellers, right? We want the story. Any summary is gonna basically get rid of 95% of the story. So you can't get that from having someone else summarize it. You can't get it from the Cliff's Notes version you got off of Blinkist or whatever. Sorry Blinkist. But that's not what we're here for. The Wikipedia, when you're not looking on your phone, there's something at the top that shows the article. It's got General Hayden, somebody who was on my show recently. Did a really good job. But then there's a talk page. And the talk page is where all the angry Wikipedia people yell at each other nonstop about what should and should not be included in the article. What's important and what's not. And so you find really interesting things in there. So for General Hayden, one of the things that I found was someone anecdotally reported that he always wore his class A military uniform to CIA or NSA headquarters, I think it was CIA headquarters, and that was really weird. Because normally someone who is a retired general would just come in a suit. And he always wore that. And people were like why did he do that? Was he trying to be grandiose? Was he trying to engender respect from the military personnel that worked there? I don't know. So I asked him. And I found out to ask him because I was on the talk page where somebody had seen him walking around. And there was some entry or photo in some obscure publication that said that he did that. It's not in any book. It's not in any news article I ever would have found. It was in the Wikipedia talk page. And that yielded an interesting answer in the interview. Most talk pages are going to be full of people yelling at each other about what news sources are credible and which aren't. But they also have a lot of speculation. They have a lot of rumor. They have a lot of, "This is proven but not good enough for the article." "This is unproven and probably a load of BS." You're gonna find things in there that these people had found. These people are amazing researchers. They have a lot of time on their hands, I'll just leave it there. They have a lot of time on their hands, and they're gonna find things that you never would have ever found in a million years. Also, bad Amazon reviews. These I think are more helpful than you would think. I was gonna show you one, but kind of a sensitive situation. I was gonna throw my friend under the bus. And when I was preparing for an interview with him, he by the way is a great book, really, really solid, but he's a scientist. I'm not a scientist. I wanna find a hole I can challenge a little bit. And what I do is look on Amazon. I sort by reviews. I don't just look at the 1-star, but I look at all the reviews. And it will show most helpful critical review. So you get a two or three star review and the person says something like, "I really like this book. "I really think it's well written, "but it uses too much anecdotal evidence. "And they only did this study. "It wasn't longitudinal. "And it was only in California. "And they didn't do such and such. "And I think that he cherry-picked the answer for this. "And that is where this conclusion came from." so during the interview, I go, "So a lot of people might say "that you cherry-picked your conclusion on this "to suit your research because you didn't "do a proper longitudinal study "of work habits among millennial males." And he goes, "Oh, I'm glad that you asked." Because he either saw that or he's been being told about it lots by his publisher. "I'm glad that you asked. "We didn't do a longitudinal study "but we did have eight bajillion responses. "And this is the number one problem "that companies come to me with when they have "millennial employees working with an older generation." That's like, Good. Criticism handled. I would never have thought of that. I never would have asked him to explain this supposed hole in his reasoning. But luckily somebody who read this book that's in his field that wrote an Amazon review was pretty detailed in why they thought he was wrong about certain things. That's a lot of your work done for you. You don't have to become a scientist to do interesting work with that. You can just find somebody who does a well-reasoned interview. Don't try to shortcut it and sort by most critical because everybody is just like, "It came dented." And you're like, "It's a book. "You'll be fine." You know you're gonna sift through a million of those. Or you'll just find people who are like saying conspiracies type stuff that I won't repeat in a film session. It's just unnecessary drama in the one-star section. You wanna find the most helpful but critical review. Usually two or three stars. And those are up voted thankfully, and helpfully, by the Amazon or whatever review community. Goodreads is also a good place to do this. Goodreads is a book review social network that nerds like me really like. And you'll find really good reviews there. Half of which are longer than the actual books. Spend some time reading the critical ones. The positive ones are not as helpful. Those are nice, they're flowery. But the critical ones that are helpful are the ones that you want to find. And then of course, Google and Ted Talks or any other sort of big think type of talk on YouTube. Those are really useful. You can play them at 2x. You can find the main points. A lot of times they'll summarize it in the talk description. And then you'll get their big idea. I'll often do that first before reading the book or before going down the rabbit hole further because they make them stop at I think 18 or 20 minutes. So you know that you're gonna spend 10 minutes, at 2x speed. Get the big idea down, and then you can kind of unpack it from there. 'Cause if you're anything like me, you'll read a whole book and go, "Crap. I forgot half of it already. "And I'm not even sure that I know what his main point is." Could have just gotten the Ted Talk and then read the book. For me, that's a lot easier. I also listen to other interviews of the same person. I find those to be super helpful because then you find out what stories they have. What, sort of, their soundbites are. And what I like to do as a host, and this isn't a segment about hosting. But what I like to do as a host is if I hear them jumping into soundbites too much, I'll cut it off. If they've got the same story that they tell the same way like, "When I was a kid I had a dog." and then rehearse, blink, pause for emotional effect. I'll just be like, "Yeah. Let's hear that later." 'Cause I know it's been on seven other shows. I know that it's rehearsed. It doesn't sound good. And if other people have heard that same guest and they go into that same story, what your brain does is go, "I've already heard this. "Fast forward. "Fast forward. "Fast forward. "Aw, shoot. "This is the same. "I also heard this. "Fast forward. "Ah, this is all fluff. Next." if I can get something they haven't talked about 87 times, it's more valuable for the audience. So go through those sources. Open them all in tabs if you wanna do that. Dump them all in a Google Doc. And then you can read and watch all of those sources. Take notes. I use a lot of audio books so I will walk around with an Android phone in one hand and my iPhone in the other playing on the iPhone and then I'll dictate into the Android phone in realtime. I was trying to do that on one phone, but then you have to pause the book and then type. Or pause the book and then dictate. So I'm literally kind of double fisting with the phones. And it's great. And then you go through the Google doc after you're done. And you type everything up that you're like, "Wait. That couldn't have been what I meant. "Oh yeah. "I didn't mean like iron bar chairs." It's like, "Oh yeah. No. "This was supposed to be something else." So you can kind of get dictation far from perfect much, much faster than just typing notes regularly all the time.
Class Materials
Bonus Materials with Purchase
Ratings and Reviews
Lacey Heward
Workflow? Spot on! This answered so many questions for me. I really appreciated Jordan being so transparent about how he sets everything up, preps guests, and communicates with his network. There were some other gems like reasons you don't send questions ahead of time, and how important it is to have recording and video dialed BEFORE the interview. Plus, I loved that this was such a short class that got straight to the meat. I watched this before going to work! Great format! Thank you!
Martin Backhauss
Really good class and many great tips and tricks. Jordan is great on camera, is well prepared and is an open book. Highly recommend this class.
wendy fite
This course will get you organized! With great recommendations on how to build a very workable, repeatable plan for your pre-production podcast activities. Jordan is awesome. The handout is the 'frosting' to his awesome 'cake' discussion.
Student Work
Related Classes
Podcasting