My best advice for becoming a better interviewer
By: Tanner Campbell
Tags: Podcasting, Podcast, Interviewing Tips, Interview, Conversations

The Tao Te Ching is a philosophical favorite of mine, and a verse from it which has stuck with me since I first read it in 2009 while vacationing in New Jersey (of all places) to attend a friend’s wedding, reads as follows:

Thirty spokes are joined together in a wheel,

but it is the center hole

that allows the wheel to function. We mold clay into a pot,

but it is the emptiness inside

that makes the vessel useful. We fashion wood for a house,

but it is the emptiness inside

that makes it livable. We work with the substantial,

but the emptiness is what we use.

With this in mind I offer my best tip for becoming a better interviewer: be quiet more often.

The emptiness of the moment is what a conversation fills, and if it is not there, then no conversation can happen. Noise can happen, but what value is there in noise alone?

Your job as the interviewer is to hold space; to provide a void into which your guest can place their thoughts and from which your audience can hear the value in their echos.

To enable you to do this, arm yourself with the following four items before you begin your interview.

#1. Two prepared questions (great questions) for every 10-minutes of hoped for run-time.

One question can easily take ten minutes to answer when you ask it and then allow the guest all the time they need to answer it. Your podcast isn’t live, so don’t interrupt them and don’t endeavor to fill the void with your own ideas — unless you yourself are a celebrity, you’re not the thing people are showing up to hear. Have two questions available for every 10-minutes of run-time ensures you won’t be caught without something interesting to ask.

#2. A pen and a pad of paper.

There are things you cannot prepare for ahead of an interview. Sometimes a guest will open up about something incredibly personal and you’ll find yourself in a moment of exclusivity. This could be big. These sorts of moments provide for unique attention draws — especially when a guest has been interviewed many times and by many people; exclusive moments make your interview unique. But you cannot get excited when they happen and derail whatever train of thought your guest is on during the moment they reveal such details.

You must silently digest it, consider it while listening, and then write down a followup up question (or two) that you can ask when they’re finished speaking. Don’t write down more than two, because it is very likely that one followup answer will lead to more questions — this can be a scary moment if you are not prepared for it! You certainly don’t want to return to your prepared questions if you feel that this unplanned course of conversation is an opportunity to fill the void with things never before heard!

That pen and pad of paper become the proverbial life raft that keeps you afloat in the uncharted seas of genuinely interesting and improvisational conversation. These are the moments when people sit up in their chairs, focus their attention, and feel truly as though they are there with you. This is what a conversationalist lives for, this is magic.

The those moments will wind down eventually, your life raft will find the shore again, and you’ll need to return to those prepared questions — but if you don’t have that pen an paper handy when these moments happen, you’ll drown in the opportunity and your listeners will suffer.

#3. The conscious understanding that your voice is to an interview as a bellows is to a fire.

You’re there to keep the flame alive, but the people around the hearth are there for its warmth and glow, and for the feeling of community which such an environment imparts. You play a critical role, but if you’re constantly bellowing away you’re blowing the heat up the chimney and people are going to get cold.

Don’t respond to what’s being said unless asked a direct question or there has been more than 5-seconds of silence. Don’t “mmhm” or “oh yeah” or “mmm” or “sure” or “right, yes” — don’t do any of that. The audience should never be reminded of your presence unduly. Listeners need only hear your voice when it is directing the conversation.

If you want to let the interviewee know you’re listening, make eye-contact with them, nod your head, smile, take notes, but do not emote with your voice. It is a distraction nearly 100% of the time. The only exception here, and only sometimes, is laughing. Not a chortle, not an agreeing chuckle, but laughing like you would at a joke, and only when a joke has been made when not laughing would make the guest feel awkward.

#4. A few hourglasses within sight

I’m old fashioned (you may be able to tell with all these metaphors!) so I use an hourglass, but you could use any number of time-keeping methods which do not require you to make an obvious break focusing on your guest. Glancing at your watch is not acceptable, but allowing your focus to move from your guest to the wall clock just behind them is subtle enough not to make the guest feel as if they are on a schedule.

Hourglasses, despite the name, can come in a range of increments, and they can be inconspicuously placed near the interview area, and even arranged in multiples, so that you can easily keep track of how long things have been going on.

I have a 5-minute a 30-minute and a 60-minute “hourglass” set. I set them all at the same time. When the five minute expires I can move from the casual, pre-interview, getting-to-feel-comfortable phase, and know that when the 30-minute empties out I’ve been conversing for 25-minutes. At that point the 60-minute timer has 30-minutes left and I can work towards winding things down.

You may prefer a different method, and in truth, eventually, you’ll become so good at this that these timekeeping devices are really only utilized during the most consuming and interesting of interviews, but they are good to get used to because it can be very painful to cut 10-minutes of quality out in post because your format has a 45-minute hard stop.

Hourglasses are nice because they are silent (as opposed to iPhone alarms, for example), easily unnoticed, and honestly lend a bit of felt importance to what you’re doing — they’re elegant things.

Interviewing is a skill that requires years of practice, don’t beat yourself up.

Since 2013 I have conducted somewhere around 150 individual interviews, and I can promise you that I still make mistakes and I still break my own rules from time to time.

Since I sometimes like to embarrass myself, here’s an interview I gave in 2014 with Peter Boghossian. I make PLENTY of mistakes in it.