How to prep a podcast interview as the host
Search for podcast interview prep and almost everything you find is written for the guest. How to prepare your talking points, how to sound good, what to send the host beforehand. Useful if you're going on a show. Useless if you're running one.
The host's job is different and mostly invisible. You're building the conditions for someone else to say something they haven't said before, and then getting out of the way. Here's what that actually takes.
The goal is one thing they haven't said elsewhere
Your guest has done other interviews. If they're promoting anything, they've done a lot of them recently, and they have a set of answers that work. Those answers are polished, they're safe, and your audience can hear them anywhere.
So the target for prep isn't coverage. It's one question that isn't in the rotation. Everything below is in service of finding that.
This also tells you what to skip. Their standard bio, the origin story they tell every time, the headline numbers from their last funding round. Know them so you don't get caught out, but don't plan a segment around ground that's already been covered five times this month.
An hour, spent in this order
Prep expands to fill whatever time you give it, and past about ninety minutes you're mostly reassuring yourself. Here's an order that front-loads the parts that change the interview.
Fifteen minutes: what they've already been asked. Find two or three of their recent appearances and skim the transcripts, or scrub the timestamps if there are chapters. You're not studying their answers. You're building a list of questions to avoid. This is the highest-value quarter hour in the whole process and it's the one most hosts skip.
Fifteen minutes: the primary material. Whatever they actually made. The paper, the product, the company filings, the book, the thing itself rather than coverage of the thing. One specific detail from primary material is worth more than a summary of everything written about them, because it signals you did the work and it gives them somewhere new to go.
Ten minutes: what's changed recently. Anything that happened in the last few weeks that they haven't been asked about yet. Recency is an unfair advantage, because their prepared answers were written before it.
Ten minutes: your own archive. Have you covered this subject? Has a previous guest said something this person would argue with? This is the material nobody else interviewing them has, and it's the fastest route to a question they've never heard. It's also the part that gets skipped, because searching your own show is annoying enough that people don't bother. That's fixable.
Ten minutes: write the run of show. Segments, not questions. More on that below.
Write segments, not a question list
A list of questions turns an interview into a form being filled in. You ask, they answer, you look down, you ask the next one. The audience can hear the list.
Segments work better. Four or five topics, in a rough order, each with a couple of fragments underneath: a fact you might use, a name you'd otherwise lose, a question you'd be glad to ask cold. Now the shape is planned and the path isn't, so you can follow an interesting answer without losing your place.
Write fragments rather than sentences. A fragment you glance at gets rebuilt in your own voice. A full sentence gets read aloud, and everyone can hear the difference between a host talking and a host reading.
Under each segment, keep one thing you could go to with no setup at all. That's your escape hatch if the segment collapses in ninety seconds, and knowing it's there is what lets you take a risk on a follow-up instead of retreating to safety. More on that here.
Get their name right and their facts checkable
Two small things that cost credibility out of proportion to their size.
Pronunciation. Find them saying their own name in any recording and write it phonetically at the top of your notes. Asking on air is fine and honest. Guessing wrong and being corrected costs the first two minutes of rapport.
Numbers. Anything you plan to say out loud, check twice, and write the source next to it. Nothing kills a segment faster than a guest saying "that's not right" about a figure you brought. If you're not sure, hand it to them instead: "I've seen the number quoted as forty percent, does that match what you see?" Now you're collaborating instead of being corrected.
What to have in front of you
Prep that lives in a document you have to alt-tab to is prep you won't use. On video, looking away is visible. Even on audio, the pause while you find the tab is the pause everyone hears.
One page. Segments, fragments, the phonetic name, three or four numbers with sources. Printed or on a second screen, in view the whole time without a click.
Everything you researched and didn't put on that page was still worth doing. You know more than you're using, and it shows in the follow-ups you're willing to ask. But what's in view during the recording has to be short enough to glance at.
What prep can't cover
You'll still lose things. Not because you under-prepared, but because hosting means listening for meaning and planning your next move on the same attention, and the better the answer, the more likely you blank right after it. The item you lose is usually small and specific: a name, a year, the episode where you covered it before.
That's the problem we build for. Tally builds the brief before the session, pulling the guest's work, their past appearances on your show, and the moments from your own archive worth bringing back. During the recording it does the part prep can't: live intelligence, which means the right information appearing on screen while you're still talking. The desktop app listens and surfaces the bio when the name goes, or the episode where a topic came up before. It makes no sound and stays out of your recording chain.
It runs on macOS today and it's invite only while we onboard shows one at a time. Here's how live intelligence works.
Tally is invite only right now
We're onboarding shows in small waves so we can set each one up properly. Leave your email and we'll reach out when the next wave opens.