The episodes that we had you listened to this week are a better age part one, and part two. And these two episodes were part of a larger series that we started at the end of season two. And if you're curious that first episode that kicked it all off was called a good age where Nate and two of our Kasama collective trainees at the time, Alana Harlins and Michelle O'Brien talked about what it was like to be the ages that they are right now, which was for that episode, they're twenties, thirties, and forties. So in these episodes, we continued right on up the decades and interviewed family members who were in their fifties, sixties, seventies, eighties, and nineties.

As we're reflecting on this episode, there really three main points that we want to share with you, and that is one, prepare your guests to help them get great sound, to start with great questions and then three, think like a listener.

So let's just take those one at a time. So before. Prepare your guests and help them get great sound, sound quality. As we've discussed in other modules can be really challenging, especially when you're dealing with a lot of different people gathering that tape. And also when you're dealing with some people are doing remote recordings, some people are doing in-person recordings.

Some people may be have access to a podcast, mic, or other equipment. Some other people might just be using the voice memo on their phones. You have a lot of different variables involved. And as you'll see in this week's module, we provide all of our guests with recording instructions to try to help them get set up ahead of time.

But I'll tell you that even with really experienced guests, who -have been through a lot of interviews, it's rare that anybody really looks through those instructions ahead of time in my experience. Anyway. And so I always kind of go in planning that I'm probably going to have to spend a couple minutes at the beginning doing some technical troubleshooting and just kind of walking them through that.

But I would say if there's one thing to really make sure that your guests understands it's that if they have wired headphones and some sort of microphone, even if it's earbuds that are wired, That they should have those ready to go, and then they should also have their smartphone ready to go. those are probably the top two things that I would say if your guests understands nothing else going into it, it's really, helpful for them to just know ahead of time.

We mentioned this in the last module, but we generally encourage people not to use air pods or some sort of wireless Bluetooth connection. It just seems to not be as consistent in terms of the sound quality being even, and, free from crackles and that kind of thing.

So one of the things to just note in this larger conversation about preparing your guests is it really helps to get a sense of just how comfortable your guest is with technology.

Talking to a fellow podcaster who may already have a podcasting mic and headphones, and be very, very comfortable with remote recording situations is a very different conversation to have. How to get great sound than with somebody who maybe has never even used a program like Zencaster or even zoom. Thinking through these considerations ahead of time and being prepared to troubleshoot on the spot based on kind of what you're anticipating that person's needs might be is a really important consideration going into an interview.

You'll hear me say this again and again and again, but always have at least one backup. I have learned this one, the hard way myself so many times, and I there's so many reasons that your recordings, your original recordings might not be usable. And. One of them might just be, you think the person is recording on their end and then it actually turns out that oops, they didn't press record or only recorded part of it, and so it's, again, really crucial that you always have a backup and that backup could be a voice memo on a phone.

That's something that almost everybody we interview nowadays will have access to. You might have to help them figure out how to download that voice memo. I've done that before, where I actually sat there on a zoom call with somebody and said, okay, let's go to your app. Let's find the voice memo doing again, doing a little, ahead of time and trying to be ready to walk somebody through.

If they have an Android, if they have a iPhone, how do they find their voice memo app doing a quick Google search ahead of time can really speed things up when you're in the interview. If you run into a situation like that, that you can just help them on the spot, download that app.

They're ready to go. Then you have that backup recording. Set aside, 15 minutes at the beginning to troubleshoot for technical issues.

And you might not need the full 15 minutes. But it's always good to just prepare people upfront. Hey, we're going to start the call, just going through this, doing a sound check, making sure everything's working properly, that can really save you a lot of headache on the back end. If you've just spent a few minutes doing that upfront.

Before we go to the second point here. I want to just say one quick thing about what to do. If you find after an interview that your tape is not usable.

One option is always to rerecord. Sometimes if you reach out to people and ask, oftentimes they won't mind having a short conversation, especially if you can write. Boil it down to, say a 30 minute conversation. That's one option. Another option is you can take the content of what they said and paraphrase it in VO so that you still get that information.

And there are, you still get to kind of credit them or quote them even, that's one option you can just say, Hey, this audio quality.

Isn't very good, but here it is, or it isn't very good. And so I'm paraphrasing, that's always an option. The other thing you can do if the audio quality is very poor, it's just use it in little snippets. Don't use long sections of it. Maybe it's just a few seconds at a time. And then you break that up with VO.

So that it's a little bit easier for the listener to engage with that less than ideal quality audio, but they don't have to be listening to it for, 10 minutes at a time. And then finally you can layer that audio with music. sometimes that's all it takes to just make it a little more listable to just have maybe some nice ambient track underneath the audio to distract a little bit from that room noise.

Finally, of course there's always plugins d script has a feature called studio sound. That is relatively new. You've heard me mentioned that before. You have to be a little careful with that. You can make them sound like. Underwater, but you can adjust the intensity on that. And for some voices that really can be incredibly helpful, even more so than some of those plugins. So as a matter of trying these things out, see if it sounds better one way or another, and then just go with the one that sounds the best to your ears in, in headphones.

I think the big takeaway for us with this episode was both the benefits and the drawbacks of creative constraints. And , whether you are doing visual art or advertising or a podcast, a lot of people will talk to you about the value.

Of a creative constraint, whether it's a deadline to force you to get work done by a certain time, a budget, which constrains the amount you can spend on a project, or in this case, we really wanted to hit that 28 to 30 minute broadcast clock.

So, that was a very small space to squeeze five lengthy interviews and five narrative. And he meant that a lot of good stuff we had to leave out, but it also meant that only the very best quotes from our five interviewees and key voiceover points could be included. And it, it also saved us from some, , arguments amongst the team about which parts we could keep and which parts we had to cut because as it turned out, we had to get each one down to about six to eight minutes per interviewee from the original length of 45 to 60 minutes and stitch in VO. The takeaway is with an ensemble interview episode like this doing a longer episode would actually be easier because we wouldn't have had to edit as rigorously. That's why you see so many longer podcast episodes it's less work it took so much effort to get each of these two episodes down to the 28 to 30 minute range, but as a result, there's no fluff. There's no wasted space. Just the essence of each person we interviewed and very streamlined VO to tie it together.

So the next key point here is to start with great questions and then ask more. I've done interviews both ways over the years I almost always start with some list of questions, but I'm not somebody who goes into every single interview with a list of set questions.

I will sometimes, especially if the guest has asked for it ahead of time. But I will always go into an interview knowing that even in that case, I'm probably going to have to ask some followup questions. Sometimes you get into an interview and the person that you're talking to just won't answer your question and the way that you're hoping they will, they just don't want to talk.

Or maybe they're not understanding the question or maybe it's even a topic that's maybe they don't actually know what they think about it yet. This'll really vary depending on who you're talking to. If you're talking to somebody who is not used to talking about their life very much, you have to ask the same question, a lot of different ways. Without making them realize that you're asking the same question again and again and again. And really what you're doing in each of those is you're saying, tell me more, , this is a classic interview technique.

You'll hear all of the great interviewers talk about. Skill that you can develop of asking. Tell me more. We had a particular situation where Nate had interviewed my grandmother and it was a remote interview. And what we ended up taking from that interview

was not usable, not because. The sound quality was so terrible, but it was more the context of the actual conversation.

The interview with Laura's grandmother was the first one I had ever done. And based on the discussions with the team, we had agreed on 10 standard questions that we wanted to ask each person to try to touch on some consistent themes with each interviewee, how they felt about being their age, whether they felt older, not some major milestones in their life.

So when I came to interview, I was going about it in a checkbox straightforward manner. And just trying to go through the questions. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, without really stepping back. To think, wait, am I really getting to the important parts of Laura's grandmother's life? Am I really helping to uncover and shine a light on her unique story?

And I was also slightly stressed out because Laura's mom happened to be standing over her grandmother's shoulder. telling her to sit up straighter or to clear her throat or to talk louder, and I think Laura's grandmother also did not feel truly able to relax and open up. And since I was an inexperienced interviewer, I was not prepared to think well enough on my feet to ask some of these questions in a little bit of a different way. Now looking back, I can see that interviewing is a skill to be learned, just like script writing and voiceover and sound design.

Even if you're not very experienced with interviews, you can kind of set yourself up for success by building in, a softball question to just get the person talking. I often will ask, especially if I'm talking to artists or, , somebody who's been at something for decades, when did you first know that you wanted to be a writer or an artist, or, , tell me about the first time you realized that this was what you wanted to do with your life?

Sometimes they say something really interesting, but a lot of times that's a question that people haven't asked them and. We've talked about family members a little bit interviewing them, but on the other end of the spectrum is famous people who have been interviewed a ton, and they're used to answering the same questions over and over again.

So having a question or two at the beginning, to just get them to relax and just start talking. That can really go a long way to getting your guests to just open up and really show kind of the best version of themselves because they're really talking authentically and from the heart and not some canned force answer that they feel like they have to answer a question perfectly.

On the same note. It's great to start with really great questions and just spend some time thinking about that. I think that is important to have some sense of that, but it's also okay to veer off course. Sometimes if your interviewee, if your guest says something really fascinating that you had no idea was coming.

That might be a great situation for you to veer off course. And , something that I know Nate was thinking about is he interviewed my grandmother was he was kind of trying to stick to the script and ask the same questions everybody else had asked because we had five different people doing these interviews, but actually what made these episodes so wonderful, is the questions produced really different answers and that sometimes those tangents were actually the most delightful part of it

The last thing I want to say at this point is that sometimes you have the opposite problem where you have somebody who goes off on a big tangent, and it's clear that that tangent is not going to be usable. In those situations. Sometimes all you need is to just say, I want to shift gears here or I want to go back to that thing you said before, or. I want to make sure we get around to talking about this thing. Sometimes that's all you need to kind of get the conversation back on course. So , that's part of it too, is figuring out how to tactfully interrupt people without them feeling like, oh man, I just got cut off.

Has a final postscript to this reflection. I wanted to share that interviewing a friend or a loved one, a non-expert tells them, I think what you have to say is important.

And I felt closer to my mom after I interviewed her, because it's not often that you sit down and have that careful of a conversation. And take such time to listen as you do, when you're interviewing someone, the intentionality of the questions that you ask and the care you take with the prep and setup can make your interviewee feel honored and valued because you're giving them your undivided attention.

And again, you're saying. To this person, your voice and your words are important enough to be recorded for posterity. And as Laura touched on earlier, subject matter experts and public figures are used to being interviewed. They're used to being consulted for their views, but regular people are not. And so it can really feel special.

So the final point here is to think like a listener. When you interview someone, especially when it's a family member or a close friend or somebody that you've known for , many years, or you're very, very familiar with their work.

You don't have to find out something new about them in that conversation, but your listener does. Your listener is the one who's going to be getting to know them through this conversation. So trying to think about what are the questions that can really bring to light who this character is. And so sometimes one way to do that is actually to pretend that you know nothing about them.

If you were interviewing this person as if you had never met them, what would be the questions that she would want to ask them? And those questions will change based on what you're hoping for from the interview and the particular episode you'll create.

But a lot of times the things that you can find out even about the people that you're very, very close to can be surprising. I often will ask them to introduce themselves and say in that introduction to include anything that they would like listeners to know about them right off the bat. And that often will give people a way to think about how to enter into the conversation and to make sure to include the parts of themselves that they feel like are the important things.

And then you can kind of take your lead from there. Of course the opposite can also happen talking to family where where it's not awkward at all. It's completely comfortable and you're having a good time and you're laughing and that's wonderful, but it can also make for really problematic interview tape.

Crosstalk, I've found is a huge challenge when you're interviewing people that, you know, well, because we're so used to doing active listening and saying, oh yeah, you know, those. Active listening cues that let people know we're listening, especially if you're in person and you don't have the option of just muting your mic, like you do on a zoom call or a video call.

It's really important to train yourself, to nod silently instead of verbally giving them feedback. Waiting until they're done talking before you respond.

So it's really finding that balance of you want the person to be comfortable, but you also don't want it to be so comfortable that you get a little sloppy in your interviewing skills.

You'll see, in this week's exercises for building your podcasts, that one of the exercises is to interview someone and I would encourage you to consider interviewing somebody close to you, maybe even a family member, it's a really special experience.

the tape that we did use for this was from one of those in-person conversations that I had after Nate had already done that other interview that we didn't end up using. I asked her if we could sit down for an hour, Just talk about her life, but it really wasn't until I sat down with her that I realized this is an important conversation for me to be having, not just for this episode, but for our relationship and for our family to have this archive of my grandmother's voice. At the time that that episode came out, she had just turned 99. So even if you don't end up having the most fabulous interview, or if it doesn't end up turning into a podcast episode, these conversations can be really important just for posterity's sake and for honoring these relationships in our lives.

So I hope you enjoy this process this week. I hope you get to interview somebody and we can't wait to hear what you create from these conversations.