How to be a good podcast guest

Plus some recommendations

Midjourney: Talking into a microphone alone, black and white

A friend is going to be interviewed on her first podcast, and she asked for advice on how to be a good guest. I’m here to help. (Much of this applies to taped interviews as well.)¹

I’ve been a guest on many podcasts, often in the course of promoting my books. I’ve done a few of the bigger ones, including those hosted by Alan Alda, Sam Harris, Laurie Santos, and Dax Shepard (all multiple times), and also a lot of small ones—such as one by a high school student who had never done a podcast before. (He emailed me with an excellent pitch). Usually, I’m talking to strangers but sometimes it’s with people I’m friends with in the real world, such as: Jonah Goldberg, Sam Harris, Joshua Landy, Laurie Santos, and Robert Wright; David Pizarro and Tamler Sommers (Very Bad Wizards); and Yoel Inbar, Michael Inzlicht, and Alexa Tullett (Two Psychologists, Four Beers).

I used to be a nervous wreck before these things. Now I’m not. I often enjoy the experience, and, ahem, I’ve even been called “a good podcast guest”. So here are some tips for newbies.

RELAX

I’ve never been on a podcast with someone who didn’t want me to be there and didn’t want everyone to have a good time. It’s in everybody’s interest that it all goes well.

Also, Podcasts aren’t live. You should check before, but many podcast hosts allow you to (and often encourage you to) redo answers you’re not happy with. So you can say: “Oops. I went on way too long. Let me try again.” Or “I shouldn’t have called my department chair a handsy drunk; let me phrase this differently.” (True also for some taped interviews.)

Isn’t this so much better than real life, where there are no do-overs?

TECHNICAL ADVICE

1. Unless you’re on Joe Rogan, you’ll do it remotely. They’ll send you all the technical information ahead of time—mostly, what equipment you’ll need and which link to click on, whether it’s Zoom or Riverside or whatever. (Be sure to check the time zone.) You should ask whether it’s audio only or also video—they often forget to say, and it matters because if it’s video, you don’t want to be in your bathrobe (unless that’s your thing!) Even if it’s an audio-only podcast, I ask to have the video on if possible, just because talking to people you can see is more fun and natural.

2. You need headphones and a microphone. Sometimes the richer podcasts will send you these for free, which is sweet. I have quite a collection.

3. Any headphones work so long as they’re comfortable. They don’t have to be big-ass expensive things little in-ear earbuds are fine too.

4. Microphone quality varies widely. Someone I trust recommended the Blue Yeti as a good affordable microphone, and I like it. But there are a lot of options on the market.

5. Take a minute to learn how to use the equipment. I was once on a podcast using my brand-new microphone and bragging about its quality, even though the hosts said it didn’t sound great. After our conversation, I held the microphone up to the camera, to show the hosts how cool it looked, and discovered it wasn’t plugged into my computer. They were picking up my voice from the (lousy) Mac microphone.

6. Adam Mastroianni gives the best piece of advice you will ever hear about microphones:

   When speaking into a microphone, hold it about three inches from your mouth.

   Or, as my friend Chris Turner, a freestyle rapper and stand-up comedian, puts it: “Hold the mic like it’s an ice-cream cone that you’re about to lick.

   To get there, you might have to put your mic on some sort of stand; in a pinch, a pile of books will do.

7. The podcast experts I heard from said that people tend to think too much about the microphone and headphones, and not enough about room and location. The smaller the space, the better. (A friend of mine does a very popular podcast from a closet.) Avoid background noise like fans or AC, and try to stay away from street noise—difficult if you’re doing the podcast in a hotel in Midtown Manhattan.

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I asked Midjourney to make a colorful picture of someone talking into a Yeti microphone, with their mouth at the right distance, and, predictably enough, I got this.

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SOME PREP

If you’re fluent and cool and never at a loss for words, you can skip this part—but if you’re such a hot shot, why are you reading this post, eh?

Do some prep ahead of time. Make sure you have some ready-to-go answers so you will never stumble over basic questions or struggle to remember key points or good examples. You can memorize your answers, use notes, or just write them down.

I always use notes the first few times I talk about a specific topic. The first time I did a podcast on my newest book, Psych, here is what I had in front of me on a file on my computer.

• Notes on a good 60-second answer to the question “What’s your book about?” They are always going to ask this, one way or another. I had this rehearsed as well.

• Notes on the sorts of questions I’m likely to be asked about. For Psych, everyone asked what I thought of Freud, so I had some notes to remind me what to say. It doesn’t have to be detailed. My notes were “Freud loser? penis envy ha ha almost Nobel dynamic unconscious Trump/Biden”. (You’re not supposed to understand all this; it’s for me.). I often got a version of “What does psychology do right?” so I had a four-item list to remind me of the field’s success stories and another four-item list to remind me of its failures.

• A few good quotes and interesting statistics

After my 10th podcast or so about the book, I no longer needed the cheat sheet.

During the podcast, I keep a whiteboard next to me (see Three Writing Tools I Love). I scribble notes during the conversation, just in case something comes to mind that I don’t want to forget.

All of the above applies to interviews too.

One extra piece of advice, just for podcasts, is to try to find some time before going on to listen to a previous episode or part of an episode. Sometimes podcasts have their quirks—for instance, some always begin with the same question—and it’s good to know about these beforehand.

FOR PODCASTS: CONVERSATION > INTERVIEW

1. Many people treat podcasts like interviews, and some podcasters think of themselves as interviewers. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it can be if done robotically—I’ve had a few where the podcaster reads out a question, stares impassively at me as I answer, and then moves to the next. Boring for me and for anyone who has the misfortune to listen.

2. The best are conversations—conversations about your work, your book, or your life, perhaps, but conversations nonetheless. If this doesn’t happen spontaneously, it’s perfectly fine to say something like: “So that’s what I think about [topic], but what’s your take?” If the podcaster has some expertise in the area you’re talking about (they often do), it’s fine to interject with something like: “So, look, I have a question for you …”

3. This isn’t a court of law. You don’t have to answer what you’re asked. You can say, “I don’t know” or “That’s not something I’m on top of, sorry”, and then shift the conversation. Or just do the politician move of answering a different question altogether: “Sure, that’s a great question about Skinner, but I really want to get into Freud. Do you know …?” (True for interviews as well.)

4. Some podcasts are sweary; others are clean. Assume the latter—don’t go full Tarantino until the host or hosts do so first. Or ask ahead of time.

Other advice?—please add to the comments.

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BESTS

I have too many friends in this business to choose a favorite podcast, but here are some other bests. (There are millions of podcasts right now, so this is of course going to be idiosyncratic—focusing just on the tiny range that I listen to, mostly those about psychology, philosophy, economics/law, and, though I’m trying to give these up, culture wars.)

Best podcast guest? One of the best has to be Helen Lewis, a sharp thinker who always cracks me up. And some of my favorite episodes of Jonah Goldberg’s Remnant are when Sarah Isgur drops by. (Sarah has her own highly-recommended legal podcast, with David French—Advisory Opinions).

Best co-hosts? I mentioned some above: David Pizarro and Tamler Sommers (Very Bad Wizards) and Yoel Inbar and Micheal Inzlicht (Two Psychologists, Four Beers), though Micheal has since dropped out. Matthew Browne and Chris Kavanagh (Decoding the Gurus) are another good duo. I always like it when Robert Wright and Mickey Kaus get together (on NonZero)—it was particularly entertaining when Mickey was a Trump supporter and they would scream at each other. Katie Herzog and Jesse Singal in Blocked and Reported are the funniest.

The best podcast that I’ve never been on? I’m a fan of Conversations with Tyler. Tyler Cowen asks bizarrely specific questions that are precisely tailored to his guests’ expertise. (“Hello. Since about 2004, there has been a decline in the quality of most street food in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, but somehow the kebabs remain excellent. What are the three most plausible theories of this?”) It’s more interview than conversation, but he makes it work.

Favorite podcast episode? It might be when Tyler interviewed Oxford Philosopher Amia Srinivasan and she refused to answer many of his questions, challenging Tyler’s premises about sex, gender, and capitalism—the back-and-forth was exciting, and they both did a good job making their case for their worldviews. Or maybe the episode of Two Psychologists, Four Beers where Michael Inzlicht talked movingly with Yoel Inbar about how the replication crisis affected his career. Very recently, I got a lot out of this episode where Robert Wright (NonZero) and Russ Roberts (Econtalk) had a smart and civil debate about Israel-Palestine. When it comes to podcasts that I’ve been on, I loved the episodes of Very Bad Wizards where they invited me to talk with them about Severence and Tár.

But perhaps the best of the best is this one, from Dead Eyes. The podcast chronicles the efforts of actor and comedian Connor Ratliff to find out why Tom Hanks fired him from a small role in Band Of Brothers. Was it really because, as Ratliff’s agent told him, Hanks said that Ratliff had “dead eyes”? In this final episode, Tom Hanks shows up!

I have podcasts that I use to help me fall asleep, but it would be rude to list them.

1. I sent a draft of this to three friends in the podcast business and all of their comments had to do with audio issues. I’m grateful for their nerdy advice.