May 19, 2025 • 41 mins
What if I told you that most interviews are mind-numbingly boring, and you're probably doing them wrong? Today I interview Tracy Johnson, and after decades in radio and working with countless shows, he's written a book, Mic Drop Moments, that shares the secrets to transforming mediocre conversations into absolute "Didya Hear That?!" moments.
In this episode, we pull back the curtain on selecting guests that will electrify your audience, ask questions that make people lean in, and tell stories that keep listeners hanging on every word. Whether you're a seasoned podcaster or just starting out, what we share will completely change how you approach interviews forever. So if you're ready to stop settling for bland, forgettable conversations and start creating audio magic, hit play right now.
The Triple Threat Filter for Interview Guests:
1. Familiarity
- How well-known is the guest to your audience?
- A familiar guest brings built-in interest and recognition
- More famous guests typically make better interview subjects
- Provides an immediate connection for listeners
2. Relevance
- Does the guest's story or background matter to your audience?
- Must align with your podcast's theme and target listeners
- Simply being famous isn't enough if the content doesn't resonate
- The guest should provide value specific to your show's focus
3. Interest/Entertainment
- Can the guest tell a compelling story?
- Ability to be engaging, dynamic, and captivating
- Brings unique perspectives or unexpected narratives
- Makes the host look good by providing memorable content
Aim to have at least two out of three criteria met. If you lose two out of three, the interview will likely be challenging to make interesting. The ultimate goal is to leverage the guest's story to enhance your podcast's entertainment value.
The 3E's of Entertainment:
1. Enhance
- Add extra details to make the story more interesting
- Go beyond the basic facts
- Ask questions like "What were you thinking at that moment?"
- Create additional context that wasn't initially present
- Make the story more vivid and engaging
2. Exaggerate
- Slightly amplify the story's impact
- Turn a small moment into a bigger narrative
- Example: A small fish becomes "the biggest catch of the season."
- Create dramatic tension without losing the core truth
- Make the story more memorable and exciting
3. Embellish
- Add creative storytelling elements
- Stage the story for maximum entertainment value
- Take a brief moment and turn it into a full narrative
- Example: A simple backstage conversation becomes an epic ping pong challenge
- Use creative license to make the story more compelling
As audiences crave authenticity, Tracy isn't saying to lie, but you can bring in adjectives that trigger the theater of the mind.
Resources Mention
Episode 677 The Ultimate Guide to Hosting and Guesting Podcast Interviews
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Today, on episode number 984 of the school of
Podcasting, I sniffed out a subtle marketing trick
that had me tripling the downloads from Jordan Harbinger.
And if you are a person that does interviews, what
if your next interview could be a game changer? Well, Tracy
Johnson, author of the new book Mic Drop Moments, he's going to
(00:22):
reveal the secrets to turning boring guests into podcast gold.
Hit it, ladies. The School of Podcasting with
Dave Jackson. Podcasting
since 2005, I am your award
winning hall of fame podcast coach, Dave Jackson, thanking you so
much for tuning in. This is the longest running
(00:45):
podcast about podcasting. And what do we do here? We
talk about planning your podcast, launching, growing,
monetizing. It's all there. The website is
schoolofpodcasting.com Use the coupon code
listnr when you sign up for. And this is new
monthly, quarterly. Yep. Brand new or
(01:06):
yearly subscription. And again, that coupon code listnr L I s
t e n e r. And so
I was listening to my buddy, Jordan Harbinger show.
He does a podcast creatively named the Jordan Harbinger
show. And he was interviewing Drew
Carey. Now, Drew Carey is kind of from my neighborhood,
(01:29):
he's from Ohio. And if you get anywhere near
somebody from Ohio and just say, oh, we like, it's in our DNA,
we have to say IO. And so I listened to that.
And so at the end of it, which he always does, he plays a
trailer for another episode. All right, that's nothing new,
although most of us don't do that, but there was even more to
(01:52):
it. So I'm going to play this whole clip. It's two minutes of
him previewing another episode of the Jordan
Harbinger Show. And I'll point out the thing that I went, hey, wait a
minute. If you're looking for another episode of the Jordan Harbinger show to
sink your teeth into, here's a trailer for another episode that I think you might
enjoy. So what happened was we were doing, not
(02:13):
unlike we're doing now, we were doing an interview. And he says, thank you, and
we'll probably go to a commercial and thank you, Howie.
And I got up and I started walking to the door, and I thought he
was like wrapping it up and going to commercial. And then I just said
to somebody really quietly, can you grab the. Can you grab the door? And he's
going, what are you afraid of? The door. And then he goes, just open the
door. And I can't open the door. He goes, just open the door. And then
(02:36):
what happened? Is I started getting a panic attack, and I started breathing heavy, and
I just turned to him and thinking that he had already thrown the commercial because
he was just talking to me. Howard, please, this is really serious. I
go to therapy for this. I have something called obsessive compulsive
disorder. I'm about to pass out. If you don't open the door, you'll be
calling 911 and taking me to the hospital. This whole thing was on national
(02:59):
radio, and I thought, oh, my God, that was probably the darkest
space I've ever been. And I'm walking through the lobby toward the door, out
into the teeming streets of Manhattan. I might as well just continue
walking and walk right into traffic. And I stopped just outside
the door, and, you know, millions of people are on the street, but I felt
very alone. And some guy came into my periphery and. And said to me,
(03:21):
are you Howie Mandel? And I, you know, I just nodded affirmatively and
he said, just heard you on Stern. And my heart dropped into my stomach. And
right before I could take off in the traffic, he said two words, which means
something very different today, but they changed my life.
And he went, me too. For more with
Howie Mandel, including some pretty awkward moments of my own making,
(03:42):
check out episode 210 here on the Jordan Harbinger Show.
So a couple things here. Number one, Jordan does the nice brain gap.
We'll be talking about that in the future in another episode
about hooking people in. But you're like, wait, what's Jordan going
to confess to? And then the other thing is, he said it was
episode number 210. And I went, wait a
(04:05):
minute. And so I went out to his website@jordan harbinger.com
I'm like, what episode was Drew Carey? Because he wasn't promoting
the next episode. And I'm like, drew Carey is episode number
1150. And Jordan
is sending me back to episode 210, which, by the way, he had a link
in the show notes to that, along with about 400 other links.
(04:28):
And then dawned on me. Drew Carey, former
comedian, now host of the Price is Right. And now
Howie Mandel, another comedian that kind of probably came up
similar around the same time. A host of a game
show and America's Got Talent, very similar
guess. And when he said, hey,
(04:51):
if you're looking for another episode, and this weekend, my power was
out. And I'm like, I'm looking for anything. I have no electricity.
And so I went over and listened to the Howie
Mandel episode. So there's two Downloads for
Jordan and I had already. I went over to
listen to Feedback Friday. I love his version of Feedback Friday. So there
(05:13):
was that one download and then he said, oh, welcome to Feedback Friday. This
week I interviewed some guy about North Korea and Drew Carey and I went, wait,
hold on, let's listen to the Drew Carey one. So there's two downloads
and then that download, he mentioned Howie Mandel. There is three.
And when I was done listening to the
Drew Carey episode and then I went to the Howie Mandel episode,
(05:35):
I went back and finished the original one I went to, which
was Feedback Friday. So he hand picked that
particular episode, I'm positive, because
he's a smart guy because it was very similar guess. And so I'm going to
do something very similar at the end of this show. The other thing I'm
going to do right now, just to show you the power of the mind
(05:58):
gap is now, Drew Carey is kind of known for
writing dirty jokes. And I thought there were a couple things
really great about this because he told one and both
Jordan and Drew laughed
pretty hard and pretty long. And this is actual
like, this is them laughing.
(06:53):
People were like pounding the table. I was so proud of myself. So
that was authentic. And I was really happy that
Jordan left it in there because it's hard to listen to that and not just
start laughing. Now here's the fun part. I'm not going to tell you the joke.
It's. It's kind of filthy. And I'll put a link to the show.
It's at the about the 49 minute mark if you listen.
(07:16):
But that's a brain gap. And let's see if you can handle
not knowing what the joke was, knowing that it elicited the,
that kind of laughter. In just a second, we're going to talk to
Tracy Johnson, author of the book Mike Drock
Moments, right after this. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. Well, joining me
(07:39):
via Squadcast tonight, he is. It's
official. I looked at his resume and I went, oh, I'm not reading all that.
He is a big shot smarty pants with years in the radio industry.
He's led multiple stations from zero to first
and much, much more. I mean, literally, we could go on for hours. But he's
here today because I got to read the book Mic Drop
(08:01):
Moments. And when I started to go through it, I was like, oh, holy
cow, this has some really good nuggets in it. So, Tracy Johnson, thanks for coming
on the show. Thanks, Dave. And I'm not offended by
Hotshot Smarty pants. But you did pretty
much just call me old about my long resume.
(08:22):
You're wise. That's it. How's that?
Yeah. So what inspired you to write this book?
Several things. First of all, I work with a
few podcasters. Not like you do, but a few podcasters. And I work with
a lot of radio shows, and I have for many years. And one of
the things that this actually started about three months
(08:44):
ago, I've started working with a new radio show in Atlanta. And
a couple of weeks into coaching them, the host
of the show said, we want to start doing interviews. And
I said, why? And it was mostly so they would have
someone else to talk to. And that's as far as they had thought the
whole thing through. It wasn't to add perspective or it wasn't to add
(09:07):
content. It wasn't to make them better. It was basically because I thought they
wanted to be lazy and they hadn't really thought the whole thing through. And so
I said, well, look, there's no such thing as a bad idea in the world
of entertainment. It's all how you apply it and how you make
it work. So let's go, let's talk about
what it takes to do a good interview. And I started to realize that most
(09:28):
of the talent that I work with doesn't do
good interviews. Most of it are. Is tune out. And
there's a lot of reasons for that that we can prevent if we go
through a process. So I started to put everything together in
how I would coach someone to conduct successful
guest interviews to make them entertaining, to make
(09:50):
them useful, and not just regurgitate the same things that they've
been asked on other podcasts, other radio shows, other streaming
providers for a million times. Yeah, that's. I
always kind of cringe. I'll be in a Facebook group and they're like,
hey, I got an episode coming out in four days, I need a
guest. And it seems like the criteria is a pulse.
(10:13):
Like if you have a pulse, you can be on my show. And in the
book, you talk about the triple threat filter because
I guess step one is maybe get someone who can bring value.
And so can you tell us a little bit about the triple threat filter?
Well, yeah, there's three threats to an interview. First of all is if you're
talking to someone that nobody cares about and nobody knows. And
(10:36):
so the first threat is the more famous
or well known a personality is, the better
guests they will probably make because you've got built in
familiarity. If they're not at all Familiar, it doesn't
make them a bad guest, but it means that they're going to have
to really be entertaining for it to pay off for your segment or for
(10:58):
your podcast. So you're going to have to do a lot of heavy lifting on
some of the other criteria. So now it also doesn't mean
that just because they're famous, they'll be a good guest because they could also be
boring. So that's number one. So familiarity of
the guest. Second criteria is, are they
relevant? I might be familiar with them, but do I care?
(11:21):
So if I don't care about what they have to say or about who they
are, then they don't fit the podcast, they don't
fit your show. It's. So I work with a lot of
radio shows who will take a well known
guest, but it doesn't fit the profile of their show or
their audience target. So it has to be relevant. Or
(11:44):
again, just like in being familiar and famous, if
they're not relevant, then you've got to do a lot of heavy
lifting in the other two categories to make them a good guest. And
then the third criteria is, are they interesting, are they
entertaining, can they tell a story? Is there something unique about them
that can make you sound better, that can make you more interesting? Because
(12:06):
the goal isn't to make the guest famous, the goal is
to leverage the guest story to make you famous.
So are they doing that? Are they enhancing the value of your
podcast and what you have to bring to your audience? Because that's the
ultimate goal. Otherwise why are they on? Yeah. And is this a
case where if you get two out of three, sorry, you're gone.
(12:29):
Now, two out of three can work, but if you lose two
out of three, if two out of three are missing, it's really, really hard to
make it work. Yeah, I suppose if you have somebody who's a total whack
job and is really funny and in the book
I reference Howard Stern's interviews with Robin
Williams several times and how much he had to edit that and real
(12:51):
Robin Williams in to make it coherent because
he would just go off and start riffing on different things. And it was all
very entertaining, but it just doesn't
resonate with the audience because it's so random. And so
you can work with that randomness. You can work with someone who is
highly entertaining, but you've got to work really hard to tell their story,
(13:14):
to make them familiar, to make it relevant to your audience so
the story they're telling resonates. How do we think outside the box
to come up with those questions that are going to really entertain and
educate. Well, Dave, you're exactly right. The
obvious questions have already been asked, and anybody who is
familiar and is interested in that guest has already heard it.
(13:36):
So you've got to get another layer beyond that. You've got to
get into a story that that guest has never told before,
and usually that's finding an emotional connection with them.
In the book, I go into how you come up with questions that get you
deeper into it. A lot of times a personality
will prepare an interview by creating their list of questions.
(13:59):
Here are my talking points. Here are the things that I want to ask. The
first list that you come up with, you should probably throw away
and go with the second and third list that you come up with
because it'll force you to get a little bit deeper. And the deeper you go
in the questions that you ask, the more likely it is you're going to
come up with a story that that guest has never told publicly before.
(14:21):
And that's where it's going to provide the most value or be the most
interesting. Second part of that is the opening question
should be something that gets them to give you an answer. And it might be
a stiff answer, but it's how you follow up on that in
conducting a conversation. Not just jumping on to the next question, but
listening for little cues that are in their answer that
(14:43):
might be a thread you can pull and take them
deeper into a story, because that's where it gets good. That's where they'll start telling
you how they felt, what they were going through at the time. And that's what
gets really relatable with people. And there's a great
interview. Ellen DeGeneres is a good interviewer. I reference
NPR quite a bit, Fresh Air.
(15:06):
And the way that they get deeper in those interviews
is pausing a beat and employing a couple of tricks.
One is the silence gap. A lot of times a guest
will give you an answer that they've answered a million times. Maybe they've even submitted
the questions they want you to ask because they know the answ answers to those
questions. And so they'll answer the question and they'll stop.
(15:28):
Well, and so as human beings, we want to fill the
silence gap. So normal podcaster will just move
on to the next question if you just sit there and
look at them and look interested. And it
encourages them to fill the silence gap themselves. And that's when
they go on and start revealing some things that are behind their first
(15:50):
answer. And that's a really effective technique. And, and then if you can
stay present, paying attention, using some
improv skills of listen and respond, you can, you
can keep that conversation going deeper and deeper. And that's when it gets really good.
Because so many people want to chime in and go, was it like this? Was
it like this? And they start giving, they make it multiple choice where if you
(16:12):
let the person do that, then you've got a great
moment. And you talk about that in the book. You have a name for it,
the where did it go, did you hear it? Moment. Oh
yeah, you want to have one of those in every interview, a did you hear?
Moment. And so when you are doing the research,
how do you know there's a did you hear it?
(16:34):
Moment? I mean, is this. Well, ideally, and
this doesn't work for every interview, ideally, and this is one of the reasons
why doing a good interview is so hard. Ideally you'll have a pre
interview where you get the guest and you have a
10, 15 minute conversation with them and say, hey, I just wanted to get to
know you. Ask your couple of questions, find out if there's anything you want to
(16:55):
know about me and you just shoot the breeze. And as part of
that you say, so you are. And the example I use throughout the book is
you're interviewing a local owner of a hardware
store that's having a grand opening. And how
are you going to make that interesting? Nobody knows who he is,
he's not relevant and he's probably not entertaining.
(17:17):
So he fails all three points in the triple threat filter. It makes a
lousy guess, but if it's a sponsor, maybe you got to put them on
so they're expecting. So how do you make the best of this bad
situation? So we got the owner of this hardware store in and as you're talking
to him, you throw around a couple of questions in the pre interview. So
what's the weirdest thing that ever happened to you in a hardware store?
(17:40):
Because, oh, there's one this one time with this weird guy came in and he
brought a chicken and he didn't have any money and wanted to change a trade,
a chicken for a drill. And you go,
there's a story I can work with. Yeah, so.
So, so you start asking questions about that and you've
identified that as this is going to be the high point
(18:01):
of the interview. This is the did you hear Moment. Now you're building your
entire conversation when you go to the real interview around
that. And in the process some of the other talking points will
come Out. So where's your hardware store again? Well, it's right there on
Main street. So that you're at the hardware store on Main Street. Now, where were
you when this gu in? And what was going through your mind? And what. How
(18:23):
did your staff react when that happened? And so now he's going to be describing
what's going on inside the store. Instead of telling you about drill bits, he's
telling. He's telling you a story. So most every
guest has that story in them. It don't expect
them to volunteer it. You're going to have to find it, identify it, and
then put them in a position where it's easy for them to tell it. I
(18:45):
know you talk a lot in there about, we talked about the triple
threat, you know, the filter. You also talk about the three
E's of entertainment. And so I thought this was just a great
way of, you know, sometimes it's like, well, don't be boring. Okay,
well, how do you define boring? Well, and then. So you had the
three E's of entertainment, so. Well, I stole this from,
(19:07):
of all people, Tommy Chong. Okay, all right,
so remember the book or the movie the Wolf of Wall Street?
There is also. There was a. There were two books. There was the Wolf of
Wall street book, and then there was the follow up after the
subject went to jail. And what happened between when
(19:28):
he went to jail, what he had, what happened while in jail, and when he
got out. And the while he was in jail, he meets Tommy
Chong. Tommy Chong was in the same jail that
Jordan Byford, I think is the guy's name. This guy
was. And so he. So Tommy said, you need to write
all this down. Your life was so interesting. You should write a book. And you've
(19:50):
got nothing else to do while you're in jail. I'll help you. And
so he spent months writing the first draft, and
he brought it, Tommy Chong. He read it for a little while and he said,
this is boring. Nobody's going to read this. This is going nowhere.
And he said, why not? He goes, because you made it boring. You've got an
interesting story, but nobody's going to going to pay
(20:11):
attention to the story the way it is. You got to turn that story into
entertainment. And so many
creators, content creators, are afraid to do this because they want
to be authentic. And you can be authentic to your story and still make your
story interesting by practicing what Tommy Chong called the three E's of
entertainment. And it's to enhance,
(20:32):
exaggerate, and embellish. It's not
A really big party. It's the biggest party of all time. And
you fill in with details of what that demonstrate what made it
that big. Big parties. So you, you. Exactly. It's like your uncle who caught the
fish, and it starts out to be a little fish. And by the time he
finishes telling it, it's a giant fish he's getting caught, one that he can hardly
(20:53):
reel in. So it's, it's what movies
do. It's based on a true story, but they take
some storytelling liberties to make the story more interesting when they put it out there
to the public. So that's exaggeration. Enhancement is to
add some things to it that make it more interesting
so it can be something, something as small as when you're
(21:15):
telling a story or when you're getting the story out from
the, from, from your guest to get them
to tell you what was going on in their mind at the time.
So what were you thinking at that time? And they'll probably never remember
what they were actually thinking, but they'll recreate something that they might
have been thinking or they, they could have been thinking. You're enhancing their
(21:38):
original story by adding some things to it that weren't there when it
actually happened. So you're not doing a documentary. You're. You're
creating some entertainment that is compelling. And the third
is embellishment. Embellishment is. I've got a. There's
a story that I. It's been long enough now. It's past the
statute of limitations, so I'll tell. There's a radio show here
(22:00):
in San Diego called Jagger and Christie. And this was,
this is back when Phil Collins and Genesis, and we're a big
band and we had, they were taking some
listeners backstage to meet the band before the
concert. Pretty typical meet and greet thing. And so they,
Jagger and Christy came to me and they said, so how are we going to
(22:21):
make this interesting? I said, well, just look for little things that are happening
backstage and then tomorrow we'll figure out how to tell that story on the air.
And so they went through, they did the whole handshake and the
pictures with the, with the artists and everything. And he
noticed that in one in, in the green room there's a ping pong table
set up. And so he asked Mike Rutherford to the band and said, what's that
(22:43):
ping pong table doing over here? And he goes, oh, that's Phil's. Phil Collins, the
drummer. Because that's Phil's. That's how he warms up. He plays, he Plays ping pong
before every concert. But by the time that was told on the
air, Jagger challenged Phil Collins to a game of
ping pong and got beat three times in a row, 21 to 3, 21 to
2, and 21 to nothing. So he embellished
(23:05):
the story. So he exaggerated. He took something that was maybe a
15 second conversation and turned it into a story by staging it
properly and made it more interesting. Nice. Well,
you talked about enhancing things, and one of the things
you also talked about, how do you make a did you hear it? Moment
is through editing. So sometimes the magic is adding something
(23:27):
to it, and sometimes the magic is taking things out that
aren't needed. So what are some of the things you hear
that you go, yeah, that was me, I would have taken that out.
You hear it all the time. And a lot of, a lot of times,
personalities, podcasters are their worst critic, their
(23:48):
own worst critic. You're over overly critical on things
that you're not sure should be there because it doesn't sound normal.
So you take out some of the best moments and at the
same time you're afraid to
edit too much because, well, what if that was important? We needed all
that background information for it to
(24:10):
the biography. We needed to set up that background for the story to make
sense. And that's really not the case when you hear
it on the air. The key is to take
out everything that doesn't need to start with the essence of the story.
What's the most interesting thing that happened in
that interview? Get that up front and then fill
(24:33):
in the gaps. Use the details, use the facts
to support the essence. Because if it takes you too long to get into it,
if it takes you a minute and a half to get into the story, a
lot of your audience has either tuned out, turned off,
or stopped paying attention by the time you get to the good part. So get
the good part up front and you'll sustain you all the way through. And that
(24:55):
comes through the editing process. So take out the things that don't need to be
there and then edit yourself in to
stage the best moments to make that guest look great.
Because that guy, when that guest shines, the reflection comes back on the
host. I know when we were getting ready for this
and I started off and I'm like, what made you. When did you decide to
(25:16):
write the book? And then immediately I went, oh, no, that's not a big bang
opening question. I was like, oh, this is
so hard interviewing somebody who knows how to interview. I'm like, oh, you blew it
so talk about that. Because so many people, I cry.
I have one tear will come out of my eye when I hear, so tell
us a little bit about yourself. I'm just like, oh, that's like one of the.
(25:38):
That just screams like, hey, I didn't do any homework, and I don't know where
to start. Can you just give me a big canvas and I'll see if there's
anything here that's interesting. So how do you figure out
where to start? If you've done the pre interview or
you've done the homework where you found a story that you want to tell,
then you can usually start.
(26:00):
Because all interviews should be recorded. You can usually
start with some get to know you questions, and it could be some small talk,
and that's all fine, but then edit yourself in
to stage that big moment. 60 Minutes does a great
job of this. When Barbara Walters had her television special,
she would come on at the beginning and say, michael Jackson
(26:22):
this, Michael Jackson that. And I asked him what was
the moment when he realized that maybe he went too far.
That interview tonight. And you play a little clip of that.
That. That is a tease for what's coming up later.
And then you go into the interview because the hook is in you.
You've made me want. It's like giving you a sample at the end of the
(26:45):
aisle on Costco. I'm gonna go buy those waffles now, right? I don't
want waffles. I don't even like waffles. But you've just made me hungry, so I'm
gonna go buy your pack of 600 waffles and take them home.
So it's giving them that sample and staging that at the beginning and
then taking out the things that don't make sense and that
don't need to be there. And what you'll usually find is that
(27:08):
the audience stays hooked and they start caring about things that they
didn't care about at the beginning because you made them interested
in it by making it that third thing. The entertainment
value in the triple threat filter. Okay, somebody's
asked you, hey, I want to come on your show. I think I'd be a
good guest. And you run them through the triple threat
(27:29):
filter, and they don't pass any of them. How do you
politely tell someone no.
One way of doing that is to get back to him and say, you know
what? I've looked into this. I've tried. I've come up. I've tried a lot of
different ways to make this work. I don't really think that you are
a good match for my audience. And I don't think you're going to look good
(27:51):
if we put you out there in front of them. That's it. So.
So it's like, I want to take care of you here. You kind of did
that when I, when I sent you the first email saying, hey, I got this
book. Take, let's take a look at you. And you. And you wanted to vet
the book first, which is a great thing to do. So, hey, I want to.
I want to take. So I sent you a copy of the book. You said,
yeah, I think I can work with this. Yeah, you vetted the interview. You did
(28:12):
your homework on it. You said, you looked at it and said, this is something
that I can make relevant to my podcast students.
Yeah. And I'm. I'm not completely all the way through, but I'm
through a big chunk. And the more I read it, I was like, oh, this
is good. And it was just obvious that your, your background and your
experience was just shining through the whole thing. It wasn't,
(28:33):
you know, so well. And so. And so a host should
put the guest through that process as
well. And the number one, that you want to protect your audience from
putting something out there that will be boring because that protects your brand.
Have you ever had to deal with someone that
is just convinced they're right and you're trying to give them pointers?
(28:57):
Because I asked this because there are so many tools
for podcasters to survey their audience
and see what the audience thinks. For me, I was just raised with a
constant improvement mindset. I'm always looking for a way to do things
better. Is there a way you can kind of point someone towards
that attitude? Yeah, I think that
(29:20):
every great talent
is motivated by two things. Same thing as on Wall street,
fear and greed. The greed in this case isn't
necessarily going out and making a fortune, but the greed
is getting their ego fed. Anybody who wants to get
behind a mic and put content out on the Internet, on social
(29:42):
media, do a podcast, do a radio show, be a video streamer, is
doing that because they want their voice to be heard. They want
to have their soapbox. And there's an ego
gratification and it feeds that self sense of
greed. So they're motivated by greed. If you
have that, then that passion
(30:04):
for how can I feed that greed as much as I
possibly can should be what motivates you to constantly improve
and grow. Because what was good enough yesterday is not good enough
tomorrow because the world is Moving so fast today. Yeah. So
you should always be looking for better ways to do things. The other side of
that is fear. And fear and greed work together.
(30:25):
Fear is, what if I'm not good enough? What if it doesn't measure up?
What if nobody downloads this? What if they don't like it? What if I suck?
And a little bit of greed is healthy, a little bit of fear is
healthy. If either of those get off on the extremes,
that's where you lose it. Because if you no longer
are no longer fearful, and if you no longer have greed, then you're no longer
(30:48):
motivated. You don't care what anybody thinks, and then your show is going to get
sloppy and nobody's going to listen. Listen. If you've got a lot
of fear, then you're going to be petrified because you've got to be confident in
this. There's got to be a swagger. If. If you don't
think, if you're afraid that you don't have anything to say and anything
of value to add, then you won't. But if you think that
(31:10):
the only thing that matters is what you have to say, you'll also fail.
So it's all things in balance with those. And if the talent
is in that place where I don't want to screw up, I've
got a lot. There's this anxiety where I want to make sure I don't make
mistakes. And at the same time, I want to not make
mistakes because I want to be successful. I want to be the best that I
(31:32):
can be. The talent coach can work with that.
And the way that I work with it is identifying the things that
the talent does well. What are you great at? What are your
superpowers? What inspires you? What motivates you? What
are the things that you do best? Let's do those more. Let's
be great at those. And then let's identify the things that you're not good at
(31:54):
and stop doing them. It's more fun
that way. It's easier. And so when a talent coach or
a program director or a mentor comes in and say, you
know what? When you do this, this doesn't work. That's not what you're
good at. They think you're criticizing them and you're not.
You're just telling them how they're going to be successful. So if you can have
(32:16):
that meeting and say, here's your path to success, we're going to maximize these
strengths and we're going to let all of these things go away. So this can
shine. Now you're working from the same on the same
page. And that can be really inspiring. Have you ever seen
or been part of the ultimate train wreck interview?
Oh, yeah, many times. I relate a story in
(32:39):
the book of a morning show in Boston that was
interviewing Kanye west backstage at a concert. And Kanye's a
terrible interview to begin with, especially when he's in a bad mood.
And the host was not prepared, had a list of generic
questions that had been asked a million times. And
so she started the interview with, well, it must be
(33:02):
really exciting to have this new album out. And Kanye goes,
that's not a question. Nice. And he sat there
and so she thought of something else. And he goes, still not a question.
And it just went nowhere. It was. It was a bog. I've still got the
audio somewhere. It was. It's so bad that it's funny.
And you hear that over and over and over. And if you do that
(33:26):
homework, if you go through the steps that I talk about in mic drop moments
where you vet the guest, you do your homework, you find out something in
there, you ask a provocative question to get it started, and you have
the right response. Once you get them in a conversation, you can turn
just about any guest, no matter how difficult they are, into something
that is magical. But if you're not prepared for that,
(33:48):
and a lot of times it's the host that just hasn't taken the time to
really be prepared. I told you before about the show in Atlanta that
wants guests on their show, mostly because I think they're lazy and
they think that they don't have to prepare that segment. If they've got a guest
coming on that works, then that's not the case at all.
There's more work involved because now you're responsible for the performance
(34:09):
of someone that you probably never met before. That's really
hard to do. And that's a lot of work that goes into that to make
that successful. Well, the book is called Mic Drop
Moments. You can find it@micdropmoments.net and if
you want to know more about Tracy, you can go to tjohnsonmediagroup.com
I'll have links to that out at the website. Traci, thank you so much for
(34:31):
coming on the show. My pleasure, Dave. Thanks for having me.
And everything we talk about today will be
out@schoolofpodcasting.com 984 One thing I want to
throw in here, and I don't believe Tracy meant this in any way,
I'm still reading the book about the three E's of entertainment.
That second one, actually the second and third
(34:53):
exaggerate and embellish. Because one of the
things that we kind of mentioned earlier is
especially the young kids love authenticity.
So you don't want to exaggerate and embellish so much that
when you finally meet one of your audience members and they're like, hey, how's the
Porsche? And you're like, the Porsche, you need
(35:16):
my, you know, 2007 Toyota Corolla.
They're like, what? Yeah, you gotta be careful with that. But I know what he
means. There are things you can do with storytelling. My favorite storytelling
book is Storyworthy by Matthew Dix. And
he talks about how you can really leave things out of
the story is really a great way to embellish it
(35:39):
because it's not something that moves the story forward and it
doesn't add anything to the story. So those were the two that I was kind
of like, don't think people are outright
lying. And so take that with the way it's meant. Not like, hey,
just make up stuff and say, it's yours. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
yeah, yeah, yeah. Hey. And if you're in the mood for
(36:02):
another podcast about episodes that goes super deep,
check out episode number 677, the Ultimate Guide
to Hosting and Guesting Podcast Interviews. This is where I
did a giant brain dump. It's actually one of my
longer episodes. And yet for a while there,
it had over a hundred percent because people kept going back and
(36:25):
listening to it more than once. So the book will be out there,
this episode will be out there, and of course, a link to that episode with
Drew Carey from Jordan Harbinger. In case you're dying
to know. What the heck were they laughing about? If you want to
laugh about starting a podcast and have some fun with a great group of people,
check out School of Podcasting. Use the coupon code listnr
(36:48):
when you sign up for either a monthly, quarterly, or
yearly subscription that comes with step by step
courses. It comes with an amazing podcasting community
and unlimited coaching with me. And
in case you needed it, a 30 day, not 7, not 14.
We don't play around. 30 day money back
(37:10):
guarantee. Check it out. Schoolofpodcasting.com
until next week. Take care. God bless. Class is
dismissed. Hey, this is Doug from King's X. And if you like what you
hear, go tell someone and may the groove be with you.
So much for tuning in. This is where we. This is.
(37:32):
Wow. Really? I'm like, I'm just starting out and my mouth is already
checked out. The modern day Robin Williams now is
David Lee Roth. And I actually love watching. I
love watching people interview him because he'll just spew
something. It's like, well, sometimes the giraffe is going to go down the
drain. You know what I mean? And you're like, what?
(37:54):
What does that.
What you hear, man, go down someone.
Today, on episode number 984 of the school of
Podcasting, I sniffed out a subtle marketing trick
that had me tripling the downloads from Jordan Harbinger.
And if you are a person that does interviews, what
if your next interview could be a game changer? Well, Tracy
Johnson, author of the new book Mic Drop Moments, he's going to
(00:22):
reveal the secrets to turning boring guests into podcast gold.
Hit it, ladies. The School of Podcasting with
Dave Jackson. Podcasting
since 2005, I am your award
winning hall of fame podcast coach, Dave Jackson, thanking you so
much for tuning in. This is the longest running
(00:45):
podcast about podcasting. And what do we do here? We
talk about planning your podcast, launching, growing,
monetizing. It's all there. The website is
schoolofpodcasting.com Use the coupon code
listnr when you sign up for. And this is new
monthly, quarterly. Yep. Brand new or
(01:06):
yearly subscription. And again, that coupon code listnr L I s
t e n e r. And so
I was listening to my buddy, Jordan Harbinger show.
He does a podcast creatively named the Jordan Harbinger
show. And he was interviewing Drew
Carey. Now, Drew Carey is kind of from my neighborhood,
(01:29):
he's from Ohio. And if you get anywhere near
somebody from Ohio and just say, oh, we like, it's in our DNA,
we have to say IO. And so I listened to that.
And so at the end of it, which he always does, he plays a
trailer for another episode. All right, that's nothing new,
although most of us don't do that, but there was even more to
(01:52):
it. So I'm going to play this whole clip. It's two minutes of
him previewing another episode of the Jordan
Harbinger Show. And I'll point out the thing that I went, hey, wait a
minute. If you're looking for another episode of the Jordan Harbinger show to
sink your teeth into, here's a trailer for another episode that I think you might
enjoy. So what happened was we were doing, not
(02:13):
unlike we're doing now, we were doing an interview. And he says, thank you, and
we'll probably go to a commercial and thank you, Howie.
And I got up and I started walking to the door, and I thought he
was like wrapping it up and going to commercial. And then I just said
to somebody really quietly, can you grab the. Can you grab the door? And he's
going, what are you afraid of? The door. And then he goes, just open the
door. And I can't open the door. He goes, just open the door. And then
(02:36):
what happened? Is I started getting a panic attack, and I started breathing heavy, and
I just turned to him and thinking that he had already thrown the commercial because
he was just talking to me. Howard, please, this is really serious. I
go to therapy for this. I have something called obsessive compulsive
disorder. I'm about to pass out. If you don't open the door, you'll be
calling 911 and taking me to the hospital. This whole thing was on national
(02:59):
radio, and I thought, oh, my God, that was probably the darkest
space I've ever been. And I'm walking through the lobby toward the door, out
into the teeming streets of Manhattan. I might as well just continue
walking and walk right into traffic. And I stopped just outside
the door, and, you know, millions of people are on the street, but I felt
very alone. And some guy came into my periphery and. And said to me,
(03:21):
are you Howie Mandel? And I, you know, I just nodded affirmatively and
he said, just heard you on Stern. And my heart dropped into my stomach. And
right before I could take off in the traffic, he said two words, which means
something very different today, but they changed my life.
And he went, me too. For more with
Howie Mandel, including some pretty awkward moments of my own making,
(03:42):
check out episode 210 here on the Jordan Harbinger Show.
So a couple things here. Number one, Jordan does the nice brain gap.
We'll be talking about that in the future in another episode
about hooking people in. But you're like, wait, what's Jordan going
to confess to? And then the other thing is, he said it was
episode number 210. And I went, wait a
(04:05):
minute. And so I went out to his website@jordan harbinger.com
I'm like, what episode was Drew Carey? Because he wasn't promoting
the next episode. And I'm like, drew Carey is episode number
1150. And Jordan
is sending me back to episode 210, which, by the way, he had a link
in the show notes to that, along with about 400 other links.
(04:28):
And then dawned on me. Drew Carey, former
comedian, now host of the Price is Right. And now
Howie Mandel, another comedian that kind of probably came up
similar around the same time. A host of a game
show and America's Got Talent, very similar
guess. And when he said, hey,
(04:51):
if you're looking for another episode, and this weekend, my power was
out. And I'm like, I'm looking for anything. I have no electricity.
And so I went over and listened to the Howie
Mandel episode. So there's two Downloads for
Jordan and I had already. I went over to
listen to Feedback Friday. I love his version of Feedback Friday. So there
(05:13):
was that one download and then he said, oh, welcome to Feedback Friday. This
week I interviewed some guy about North Korea and Drew Carey and I went, wait,
hold on, let's listen to the Drew Carey one. So there's two downloads
and then that download, he mentioned Howie Mandel. There is three.
And when I was done listening to the
Drew Carey episode and then I went to the Howie Mandel episode,
(05:35):
I went back and finished the original one I went to, which
was Feedback Friday. So he hand picked that
particular episode, I'm positive, because
he's a smart guy because it was very similar guess. And so I'm going to
do something very similar at the end of this show. The other thing I'm
going to do right now, just to show you the power of the mind
(05:58):
gap is now, Drew Carey is kind of known for
writing dirty jokes. And I thought there were a couple things
really great about this because he told one and both
Jordan and Drew laughed
pretty hard and pretty long. And this is actual
like, this is them laughing.
(06:53):
People were like pounding the table. I was so proud of myself. So
that was authentic. And I was really happy that
Jordan left it in there because it's hard to listen to that and not just
start laughing. Now here's the fun part. I'm not going to tell you the joke.
It's. It's kind of filthy. And I'll put a link to the show.
It's at the about the 49 minute mark if you listen.
(07:16):
But that's a brain gap. And let's see if you can handle
not knowing what the joke was, knowing that it elicited the,
that kind of laughter. In just a second, we're going to talk to
Tracy Johnson, author of the book Mike Drock
Moments, right after this. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. Well, joining me
(07:39):
via Squadcast tonight, he is. It's
official. I looked at his resume and I went, oh, I'm not reading all that.
He is a big shot smarty pants with years in the radio industry.
He's led multiple stations from zero to first
and much, much more. I mean, literally, we could go on for hours. But he's
here today because I got to read the book Mic Drop
(08:01):
Moments. And when I started to go through it, I was like, oh, holy
cow, this has some really good nuggets in it. So, Tracy Johnson, thanks for coming
on the show. Thanks, Dave. And I'm not offended by
Hotshot Smarty pants. But you did pretty
much just call me old about my long resume.
(08:22):
You're wise. That's it. How's that?
Yeah. So what inspired you to write this book?
Several things. First of all, I work with a
few podcasters. Not like you do, but a few podcasters. And I work with
a lot of radio shows, and I have for many years. And one of
the things that this actually started about three months
(08:44):
ago, I've started working with a new radio show in Atlanta. And
a couple of weeks into coaching them, the host
of the show said, we want to start doing interviews. And
I said, why? And it was mostly so they would have
someone else to talk to. And that's as far as they had thought the
whole thing through. It wasn't to add perspective or it wasn't to add
(09:07):
content. It wasn't to make them better. It was basically because I thought they
wanted to be lazy and they hadn't really thought the whole thing through. And so
I said, well, look, there's no such thing as a bad idea in the world
of entertainment. It's all how you apply it and how you make
it work. So let's go, let's talk about
what it takes to do a good interview. And I started to realize that most
(09:28):
of the talent that I work with doesn't do
good interviews. Most of it are. Is tune out. And
there's a lot of reasons for that that we can prevent if we go
through a process. So I started to put everything together in
how I would coach someone to conduct successful
guest interviews to make them entertaining, to make
(09:50):
them useful, and not just regurgitate the same things that they've
been asked on other podcasts, other radio shows, other streaming
providers for a million times. Yeah, that's. I
always kind of cringe. I'll be in a Facebook group and they're like,
hey, I got an episode coming out in four days, I need a
guest. And it seems like the criteria is a pulse.
(10:13):
Like if you have a pulse, you can be on my show. And in the
book, you talk about the triple threat filter because
I guess step one is maybe get someone who can bring value.
And so can you tell us a little bit about the triple threat filter?
Well, yeah, there's three threats to an interview. First of all is if you're
talking to someone that nobody cares about and nobody knows. And
(10:36):
so the first threat is the more famous
or well known a personality is, the better
guests they will probably make because you've got built in
familiarity. If they're not at all Familiar, it doesn't
make them a bad guest, but it means that they're going to have
to really be entertaining for it to pay off for your segment or for
(10:58):
your podcast. So you're going to have to do a lot of heavy lifting on
some of the other criteria. So now it also doesn't mean
that just because they're famous, they'll be a good guest because they could also be
boring. So that's number one. So familiarity of
the guest. Second criteria is, are they
relevant? I might be familiar with them, but do I care?
(11:21):
So if I don't care about what they have to say or about who they
are, then they don't fit the podcast, they don't
fit your show. It's. So I work with a lot of
radio shows who will take a well known
guest, but it doesn't fit the profile of their show or
their audience target. So it has to be relevant. Or
(11:44):
again, just like in being familiar and famous, if
they're not relevant, then you've got to do a lot of heavy
lifting in the other two categories to make them a good guest. And
then the third criteria is, are they interesting, are they
entertaining, can they tell a story? Is there something unique about them
that can make you sound better, that can make you more interesting? Because
(12:06):
the goal isn't to make the guest famous, the goal is
to leverage the guest story to make you famous.
So are they doing that? Are they enhancing the value of your
podcast and what you have to bring to your audience? Because that's the
ultimate goal. Otherwise why are they on? Yeah. And is this a
case where if you get two out of three, sorry, you're gone.
(12:29):
Now, two out of three can work, but if you lose two
out of three, if two out of three are missing, it's really, really hard to
make it work. Yeah, I suppose if you have somebody who's a total whack
job and is really funny and in the book
I reference Howard Stern's interviews with Robin
Williams several times and how much he had to edit that and real
(12:51):
Robin Williams in to make it coherent because
he would just go off and start riffing on different things. And it was all
very entertaining, but it just doesn't
resonate with the audience because it's so random. And so
you can work with that randomness. You can work with someone who is
highly entertaining, but you've got to work really hard to tell their story,
(13:14):
to make them familiar, to make it relevant to your audience so
the story they're telling resonates. How do we think outside the box
to come up with those questions that are going to really entertain and
educate. Well, Dave, you're exactly right. The
obvious questions have already been asked, and anybody who is
familiar and is interested in that guest has already heard it.
(13:36):
So you've got to get another layer beyond that. You've got to
get into a story that that guest has never told before,
and usually that's finding an emotional connection with them.
In the book, I go into how you come up with questions that get you
deeper into it. A lot of times a personality
will prepare an interview by creating their list of questions.
(13:59):
Here are my talking points. Here are the things that I want to ask. The
first list that you come up with, you should probably throw away
and go with the second and third list that you come up with
because it'll force you to get a little bit deeper. And the deeper you go
in the questions that you ask, the more likely it is you're going to
come up with a story that that guest has never told publicly before.
(14:21):
And that's where it's going to provide the most value or be the most
interesting. Second part of that is the opening question
should be something that gets them to give you an answer. And it might be
a stiff answer, but it's how you follow up on that in
conducting a conversation. Not just jumping on to the next question, but
listening for little cues that are in their answer that
(14:43):
might be a thread you can pull and take them
deeper into a story, because that's where it gets good. That's where they'll start telling
you how they felt, what they were going through at the time. And that's what
gets really relatable with people. And there's a great
interview. Ellen DeGeneres is a good interviewer. I reference
NPR quite a bit, Fresh Air.
(15:06):
And the way that they get deeper in those interviews
is pausing a beat and employing a couple of tricks.
One is the silence gap. A lot of times a guest
will give you an answer that they've answered a million times. Maybe they've even submitted
the questions they want you to ask because they know the answ answers to those
questions. And so they'll answer the question and they'll stop.
(15:28):
Well, and so as human beings, we want to fill the
silence gap. So normal podcaster will just move
on to the next question if you just sit there and
look at them and look interested. And it
encourages them to fill the silence gap themselves. And that's when
they go on and start revealing some things that are behind their first
(15:50):
answer. And that's a really effective technique. And, and then if you can
stay present, paying attention, using some
improv skills of listen and respond, you can, you
can keep that conversation going deeper and deeper. And that's when it gets really good.
Because so many people want to chime in and go, was it like this? Was
it like this? And they start giving, they make it multiple choice where if you
(16:12):
let the person do that, then you've got a great
moment. And you talk about that in the book. You have a name for it,
the where did it go, did you hear it? Moment. Oh
yeah, you want to have one of those in every interview, a did you hear?
Moment. And so when you are doing the research,
how do you know there's a did you hear it?
(16:34):
Moment? I mean, is this. Well, ideally, and
this doesn't work for every interview, ideally, and this is one of the reasons
why doing a good interview is so hard. Ideally you'll have a pre
interview where you get the guest and you have a
10, 15 minute conversation with them and say, hey, I just wanted to get to
know you. Ask your couple of questions, find out if there's anything you want to
(16:55):
know about me and you just shoot the breeze. And as part of
that you say, so you are. And the example I use throughout the book is
you're interviewing a local owner of a hardware
store that's having a grand opening. And how
are you going to make that interesting? Nobody knows who he is,
he's not relevant and he's probably not entertaining.
(17:17):
So he fails all three points in the triple threat filter. It makes a
lousy guess, but if it's a sponsor, maybe you got to put them on
so they're expecting. So how do you make the best of this bad
situation? So we got the owner of this hardware store in and as you're talking
to him, you throw around a couple of questions in the pre interview. So
what's the weirdest thing that ever happened to you in a hardware store?
(17:40):
Because, oh, there's one this one time with this weird guy came in and he
brought a chicken and he didn't have any money and wanted to change a trade,
a chicken for a drill. And you go,
there's a story I can work with. Yeah, so.
So, so you start asking questions about that and you've
identified that as this is going to be the high point
(18:01):
of the interview. This is the did you hear Moment. Now you're building your
entire conversation when you go to the real interview around
that. And in the process some of the other talking points will
come Out. So where's your hardware store again? Well, it's right there on
Main street. So that you're at the hardware store on Main Street. Now, where were
you when this gu in? And what was going through your mind? And what. How
(18:23):
did your staff react when that happened? And so now he's going to be describing
what's going on inside the store. Instead of telling you about drill bits, he's
telling. He's telling you a story. So most every
guest has that story in them. It don't expect
them to volunteer it. You're going to have to find it, identify it, and
then put them in a position where it's easy for them to tell it. I
(18:45):
know you talk a lot in there about, we talked about the triple
threat, you know, the filter. You also talk about the three
E's of entertainment. And so I thought this was just a great
way of, you know, sometimes it's like, well, don't be boring. Okay,
well, how do you define boring? Well, and then. So you had the
three E's of entertainment, so. Well, I stole this from,
(19:07):
of all people, Tommy Chong. Okay, all right,
so remember the book or the movie the Wolf of Wall Street?
There is also. There was a. There were two books. There was the Wolf of
Wall street book, and then there was the follow up after the
subject went to jail. And what happened between when
(19:28):
he went to jail, what he had, what happened while in jail, and when he
got out. And the while he was in jail, he meets Tommy
Chong. Tommy Chong was in the same jail that
Jordan Byford, I think is the guy's name. This guy
was. And so he. So Tommy said, you need to write
all this down. Your life was so interesting. You should write a book. And you've
(19:50):
got nothing else to do while you're in jail. I'll help you. And
so he spent months writing the first draft, and
he brought it, Tommy Chong. He read it for a little while and he said,
this is boring. Nobody's going to read this. This is going nowhere.
And he said, why not? He goes, because you made it boring. You've got an
interesting story, but nobody's going to going to pay
(20:11):
attention to the story the way it is. You got to turn that story into
entertainment. And so many
creators, content creators, are afraid to do this because they want
to be authentic. And you can be authentic to your story and still make your
story interesting by practicing what Tommy Chong called the three E's of
entertainment. And it's to enhance,
(20:32):
exaggerate, and embellish. It's not
A really big party. It's the biggest party of all time. And
you fill in with details of what that demonstrate what made it
that big. Big parties. So you, you. Exactly. It's like your uncle who caught the
fish, and it starts out to be a little fish. And by the time he
finishes telling it, it's a giant fish he's getting caught, one that he can hardly
(20:53):
reel in. So it's, it's what movies
do. It's based on a true story, but they take
some storytelling liberties to make the story more interesting when they put it out there
to the public. So that's exaggeration. Enhancement is to
add some things to it that make it more interesting
so it can be something, something as small as when you're
(21:15):
telling a story or when you're getting the story out from
the, from, from your guest to get them
to tell you what was going on in their mind at the time.
So what were you thinking at that time? And they'll probably never remember
what they were actually thinking, but they'll recreate something that they might
have been thinking or they, they could have been thinking. You're enhancing their
(21:38):
original story by adding some things to it that weren't there when it
actually happened. So you're not doing a documentary. You're. You're
creating some entertainment that is compelling. And the third
is embellishment. Embellishment is. I've got a. There's
a story that I. It's been long enough now. It's past the
statute of limitations, so I'll tell. There's a radio show here
(22:00):
in San Diego called Jagger and Christie. And this was,
this is back when Phil Collins and Genesis, and we're a big
band and we had, they were taking some
listeners backstage to meet the band before the
concert. Pretty typical meet and greet thing. And so they,
Jagger and Christy came to me and they said, so how are we going to
(22:21):
make this interesting? I said, well, just look for little things that are happening
backstage and then tomorrow we'll figure out how to tell that story on the air.
And so they went through, they did the whole handshake and the
pictures with the, with the artists and everything. And he
noticed that in one in, in the green room there's a ping pong table
set up. And so he asked Mike Rutherford to the band and said, what's that
(22:43):
ping pong table doing over here? And he goes, oh, that's Phil's. Phil Collins, the
drummer. Because that's Phil's. That's how he warms up. He plays, he Plays ping pong
before every concert. But by the time that was told on the
air, Jagger challenged Phil Collins to a game of
ping pong and got beat three times in a row, 21 to 3, 21 to
2, and 21 to nothing. So he embellished
(23:05):
the story. So he exaggerated. He took something that was maybe a
15 second conversation and turned it into a story by staging it
properly and made it more interesting. Nice. Well,
you talked about enhancing things, and one of the things
you also talked about, how do you make a did you hear it? Moment
is through editing. So sometimes the magic is adding something
(23:27):
to it, and sometimes the magic is taking things out that
aren't needed. So what are some of the things you hear
that you go, yeah, that was me, I would have taken that out.
You hear it all the time. And a lot of, a lot of times,
personalities, podcasters are their worst critic, their
(23:48):
own worst critic. You're over overly critical on things
that you're not sure should be there because it doesn't sound normal.
So you take out some of the best moments and at the
same time you're afraid to
edit too much because, well, what if that was important? We needed all
that background information for it to
(24:10):
the biography. We needed to set up that background for the story to make
sense. And that's really not the case when you hear
it on the air. The key is to take
out everything that doesn't need to start with the essence of the story.
What's the most interesting thing that happened in
that interview? Get that up front and then fill
(24:33):
in the gaps. Use the details, use the facts
to support the essence. Because if it takes you too long to get into it,
if it takes you a minute and a half to get into the story, a
lot of your audience has either tuned out, turned off,
or stopped paying attention by the time you get to the good part. So get
the good part up front and you'll sustain you all the way through. And that
(24:55):
comes through the editing process. So take out the things that don't need to be
there and then edit yourself in to
stage the best moments to make that guest look great.
Because that guy, when that guest shines, the reflection comes back on the
host. I know when we were getting ready for this
and I started off and I'm like, what made you. When did you decide to
(25:16):
write the book? And then immediately I went, oh, no, that's not a big bang
opening question. I was like, oh, this is
so hard interviewing somebody who knows how to interview. I'm like, oh, you blew it
so talk about that. Because so many people, I cry.
I have one tear will come out of my eye when I hear, so tell
us a little bit about yourself. I'm just like, oh, that's like one of the.
(25:38):
That just screams like, hey, I didn't do any homework, and I don't know where
to start. Can you just give me a big canvas and I'll see if there's
anything here that's interesting. So how do you figure out
where to start? If you've done the pre interview or
you've done the homework where you found a story that you want to tell,
then you can usually start.
(26:00):
Because all interviews should be recorded. You can usually
start with some get to know you questions, and it could be some small talk,
and that's all fine, but then edit yourself in
to stage that big moment. 60 Minutes does a great
job of this. When Barbara Walters had her television special,
she would come on at the beginning and say, michael Jackson
(26:22):
this, Michael Jackson that. And I asked him what was
the moment when he realized that maybe he went too far.
That interview tonight. And you play a little clip of that.
That. That is a tease for what's coming up later.
And then you go into the interview because the hook is in you.
You've made me want. It's like giving you a sample at the end of the
(26:45):
aisle on Costco. I'm gonna go buy those waffles now, right? I don't
want waffles. I don't even like waffles. But you've just made me hungry, so I'm
gonna go buy your pack of 600 waffles and take them home.
So it's giving them that sample and staging that at the beginning and
then taking out the things that don't make sense and that
don't need to be there. And what you'll usually find is that
(27:08):
the audience stays hooked and they start caring about things that they
didn't care about at the beginning because you made them interested
in it by making it that third thing. The entertainment
value in the triple threat filter. Okay, somebody's
asked you, hey, I want to come on your show. I think I'd be a
good guest. And you run them through the triple threat
(27:29):
filter, and they don't pass any of them. How do you
politely tell someone no.
One way of doing that is to get back to him and say, you know
what? I've looked into this. I've tried. I've come up. I've tried a lot of
different ways to make this work. I don't really think that you are
a good match for my audience. And I don't think you're going to look good
(27:51):
if we put you out there in front of them. That's it. So.
So it's like, I want to take care of you here. You kind of did
that when I, when I sent you the first email saying, hey, I got this
book. Take, let's take a look at you. And you. And you wanted to vet
the book first, which is a great thing to do. So, hey, I want to.
I want to take. So I sent you a copy of the book. You said,
yeah, I think I can work with this. Yeah, you vetted the interview. You did
(28:12):
your homework on it. You said, you looked at it and said, this is something
that I can make relevant to my podcast students.
Yeah. And I'm. I'm not completely all the way through, but I'm
through a big chunk. And the more I read it, I was like, oh, this
is good. And it was just obvious that your, your background and your
experience was just shining through the whole thing. It wasn't,
(28:33):
you know, so well. And so. And so a host should
put the guest through that process as
well. And the number one, that you want to protect your audience from
putting something out there that will be boring because that protects your brand.
Have you ever had to deal with someone that
is just convinced they're right and you're trying to give them pointers?
(28:57):
Because I asked this because there are so many tools
for podcasters to survey their audience
and see what the audience thinks. For me, I was just raised with a
constant improvement mindset. I'm always looking for a way to do things
better. Is there a way you can kind of point someone towards
that attitude? Yeah, I think that
(29:20):
every great talent
is motivated by two things. Same thing as on Wall street,
fear and greed. The greed in this case isn't
necessarily going out and making a fortune, but the greed
is getting their ego fed. Anybody who wants to get
behind a mic and put content out on the Internet, on social
(29:42):
media, do a podcast, do a radio show, be a video streamer, is
doing that because they want their voice to be heard. They want
to have their soapbox. And there's an ego
gratification and it feeds that self sense of
greed. So they're motivated by greed. If you
have that, then that passion
(30:04):
for how can I feed that greed as much as I
possibly can should be what motivates you to constantly improve
and grow. Because what was good enough yesterday is not good enough
tomorrow because the world is Moving so fast today. Yeah. So
you should always be looking for better ways to do things. The other side of
that is fear. And fear and greed work together.
(30:25):
Fear is, what if I'm not good enough? What if it doesn't measure up?
What if nobody downloads this? What if they don't like it? What if I suck?
And a little bit of greed is healthy, a little bit of fear is
healthy. If either of those get off on the extremes,
that's where you lose it. Because if you no longer
are no longer fearful, and if you no longer have greed, then you're no longer
(30:48):
motivated. You don't care what anybody thinks, and then your show is going to get
sloppy and nobody's going to listen. Listen. If you've got a lot
of fear, then you're going to be petrified because you've got to be confident in
this. There's got to be a swagger. If. If you don't
think, if you're afraid that you don't have anything to say and anything
of value to add, then you won't. But if you think that
(31:10):
the only thing that matters is what you have to say, you'll also fail.
So it's all things in balance with those. And if the talent
is in that place where I don't want to screw up, I've
got a lot. There's this anxiety where I want to make sure I don't make
mistakes. And at the same time, I want to not make
mistakes because I want to be successful. I want to be the best that I
(31:32):
can be. The talent coach can work with that.
And the way that I work with it is identifying the things that
the talent does well. What are you great at? What are your
superpowers? What inspires you? What motivates you? What
are the things that you do best? Let's do those more. Let's
be great at those. And then let's identify the things that you're not good at
(31:54):
and stop doing them. It's more fun
that way. It's easier. And so when a talent coach or
a program director or a mentor comes in and say, you
know what? When you do this, this doesn't work. That's not what you're
good at. They think you're criticizing them and you're not.
You're just telling them how they're going to be successful. So if you can have
(32:16):
that meeting and say, here's your path to success, we're going to maximize these
strengths and we're going to let all of these things go away. So this can
shine. Now you're working from the same on the same
page. And that can be really inspiring. Have you ever seen
or been part of the ultimate train wreck interview?
Oh, yeah, many times. I relate a story in
(32:39):
the book of a morning show in Boston that was
interviewing Kanye west backstage at a concert. And Kanye's a
terrible interview to begin with, especially when he's in a bad mood.
And the host was not prepared, had a list of generic
questions that had been asked a million times. And
so she started the interview with, well, it must be
(33:02):
really exciting to have this new album out. And Kanye goes,
that's not a question. Nice. And he sat there
and so she thought of something else. And he goes, still not a question.
And it just went nowhere. It was. It was a bog. I've still got the
audio somewhere. It was. It's so bad that it's funny.
And you hear that over and over and over. And if you do that
(33:26):
homework, if you go through the steps that I talk about in mic drop moments
where you vet the guest, you do your homework, you find out something in
there, you ask a provocative question to get it started, and you have
the right response. Once you get them in a conversation, you can turn
just about any guest, no matter how difficult they are, into something
that is magical. But if you're not prepared for that,
(33:48):
and a lot of times it's the host that just hasn't taken the time to
really be prepared. I told you before about the show in Atlanta that
wants guests on their show, mostly because I think they're lazy and
they think that they don't have to prepare that segment. If they've got a guest
coming on that works, then that's not the case at all.
There's more work involved because now you're responsible for the performance
(34:09):
of someone that you probably never met before. That's really
hard to do. And that's a lot of work that goes into that to make
that successful. Well, the book is called Mic Drop
Moments. You can find it@micdropmoments.net and if
you want to know more about Tracy, you can go to tjohnsonmediagroup.com
I'll have links to that out at the website. Traci, thank you so much for
(34:31):
coming on the show. My pleasure, Dave. Thanks for having me.
And everything we talk about today will be
out@schoolofpodcasting.com 984 One thing I want to
throw in here, and I don't believe Tracy meant this in any way,
I'm still reading the book about the three E's of entertainment.
That second one, actually the second and third
(34:53):
exaggerate and embellish. Because one of the
things that we kind of mentioned earlier is
especially the young kids love authenticity.
So you don't want to exaggerate and embellish so much that
when you finally meet one of your audience members and they're like, hey, how's the
Porsche? And you're like, the Porsche, you need
(35:16):
my, you know, 2007 Toyota Corolla.
They're like, what? Yeah, you gotta be careful with that. But I know what he
means. There are things you can do with storytelling. My favorite storytelling
book is Storyworthy by Matthew Dix. And
he talks about how you can really leave things out of
the story is really a great way to embellish it
(35:39):
because it's not something that moves the story forward and it
doesn't add anything to the story. So those were the two that I was kind
of like, don't think people are outright
lying. And so take that with the way it's meant. Not like, hey,
just make up stuff and say, it's yours. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
yeah, yeah, yeah. Hey. And if you're in the mood for
(36:02):
another podcast about episodes that goes super deep,
check out episode number 677, the Ultimate Guide
to Hosting and Guesting Podcast Interviews. This is where I
did a giant brain dump. It's actually one of my
longer episodes. And yet for a while there,
it had over a hundred percent because people kept going back and
(36:25):
listening to it more than once. So the book will be out there,
this episode will be out there, and of course, a link to that episode with
Drew Carey from Jordan Harbinger. In case you're dying
to know. What the heck were they laughing about? If you want to
laugh about starting a podcast and have some fun with a great group of people,
check out School of Podcasting. Use the coupon code listnr
(36:48):
when you sign up for either a monthly, quarterly, or
yearly subscription that comes with step by step
courses. It comes with an amazing podcasting community
and unlimited coaching with me. And
in case you needed it, a 30 day, not 7, not 14.
We don't play around. 30 day money back
(37:10):
guarantee. Check it out. Schoolofpodcasting.com
until next week. Take care. God bless. Class is
dismissed. Hey, this is Doug from King's X. And if you like what you
hear, go tell someone and may the groove be with you.
So much for tuning in. This is where we. This is.
(37:32):
Wow. Really? I'm like, I'm just starting out and my mouth is already
checked out. The modern day Robin Williams now is
David Lee Roth. And I actually love watching. I
love watching people interview him because he'll just spew
something. It's like, well, sometimes the giraffe is going to go down the
drain. You know what I mean? And you're like, what?
(37:54):
What does that.
What you hear, man, go down someone.
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