In this episode, Pilar talks about those interviews she never published, and why.
Three good reasons for not publishing an interview:
– The guest has nothing interesting to say (usually happens when they’re not really up for sharing)
– The guest doesn’t come across as credible
– They’re the wrong guest for the show (but their PR representative misled you…)
Pilar mentions episode 21 from Adventures in Podcasting, with Myriam Hadnes:
Recommended podcast: Death of 1000 cuts with Tim Claire.
If you’re thinking of starting your own podcasting adventure, I recommend Buzzsprout as host – click here for my affiliate link, which also gets you a little discount, and Riverside FM for recording, which you can access through this other affiliate link.
Transcript
This is episode 42 of the show. It’s day four of the NAPODPOMO challenge, where podcasters commit to publishing an episode every day.
For me, the challenge more than this constant publishing, which is proving a challenge already on day four, is to keep it short. Because if we’re going to do this every day, we can’t be doing 1 hour episodes like I am used to. So what I’ve done is I have chosen topics that were part of my content for the Adventures in Podcasting book, which I hope to write one day.
And today I’m going to talk about the interviews I never published. But before I do that, shout out to Jennifer Navarrete, who is the organizer of NaPodPoMo. We have a Facebook group that we can join and where we talk.
I’m not talking much, but I will at some point when I have something to say. So what do we do, podcasters, with those interviews that we either during the interview, we go, who’s going to want to listen to this? Or this is so off topic, or you’re not really, really opening up at all, are you? What do we do with that? It’s not that every podcaster has guests, because this is another pet peeve of mine, is that some people think that all podcasts have guests on them. This is a proof, of course, Adventures in Podcasting, that that is not the case.
So what do we do, though? What do we do if we record the interview and then we think, oh, it’s not suitable. And well, I think I’ve been quite fortunate. I haven’t had many of those, but I have had some.
And funnily enough, when I started to jot down ideas for the book, I had one, but now I can count maybe five. So I’m just going to tell you about them. Just one, if you are a podcaster and this has happened to you, then why, it’d be lovely to hear from you, because it’s good to know we’re not alone.
And two, so that if it does happen to you, that I don’t know that you’ve heard that it happens to everyone. The first interview that this happened, when this happened to me, funnily enough, it was quite a long time ago, when I was still doing 21st century work life with Lisette, my co host, and both of us got pitched by the same person to be on the show.
And because we talk, people, we talk, podcasters talk to each other, and also we’re friends. But often I do ask Lisette if she’s interviewed someone and we thought, well, why don’t we interview him together? So I set up the recording. I got a date when the three of us could go online.
We were still recording with Skype then with a plugin, and we recorded. And throughout the recording, we just realized, this guy is not saying anything. All he was interested in saying is how much money he’d made with his company.
He was a remote worker. And in fact, the funny thing is that after this terrible interview, I kept seeing him on, like, lists of top 100 remote thought leaders, and I was like, basically, we tried to get him to talk about how his team worked, and he just wouldn’t, he just would not tell us how they worked together.
So at the end of the interview, I just thought, there’s no way. And I spoke to Lisette and she also said, man, he hasn’t given us anything. I posted on Virtual Team Talk, which is a community where I used to be very active and people said, well, whatever you think and it’s your show.
I thought, yeah, it is my show, actually. So I decided not to publish it. I didn’t tell him and I’ll come back to this later, telling your guests that you’re not going to publish it.
And then a couple of days later I received basically a repeat email or something saying, when are we recording? Or something like that. The guy had all these pitching emails on automation and this was before everyone had them automated. And he just got back to me and then he said something about the fact that I had canceled an interview.
He did not realize that he was now emailing someone he had recorded with. So if I had any doubts about whether I should publish or not, he made it really easy. That was the first one.
There’s been a couple more where it’s been more difficult and I remember one which was quite a long time ago where I was actually quite fond of the guest, but they just didn’t come across as someone credible. And I’d known them for a while, but I just thought, I don’t think this is going to be possible. And I asked someone to listen to them and they said, no, don’t publish it because they don’t come across very well.
Again, that was another reason for not publishing something. We want our guests to look good because as a listener, if you don’t really rate or connect or feel comfortable with the guest, you’re going to stop listening anyway. So thinking of the listener and thinking of the guest because yes, they’ve given me my time to record and they’ve given the energy and present, it wasn’t like they didn’t care, but they don’t come across as great and therefore I just think it’s better not to publish it. So that one took me a while.
That one was difficult to decide not to publish. And it’s a shame there’s been another recent one as well where it was quite okay. This is another problem and if you’ve been podcasting for a while oh my God, I think this one’s going to be longer than ten minutes.
If you’ve been podcasting for a while, you probably get pitches from third parties, whether they are people who are pitching you, their boss, or people who work for PR companies or podcast booking companies. And I got this pitch, I think it was from a marketing company and it was the author of a book. He wasn’t very well known, but he had co authored a book that is very well known and so I wasn’t sure it was about leadership.
And I said to the guy who was pitching it and I read the book and the book is absolutely fine, but it didn’t have anything about leading from a distance. And this was for the 21st Century Work Life Podcast, which is mainly about leading remote teams and working remotely. So I wrote to the person who was pitching it, who was very nice.
This is another thing, is that when you’re pitched by third parties, you develop a relationship with the person booking, not with your guest. And I don’t like that. But I said to the person, look, can this person talk about leading remote teams? And they said yeah, this was after Corona or during that period.
To cut a very long story short, when we got to the interview, there was just no correlation. This person had just come across leading remote teams during the pandemic. They thought that it was all about empathy and having conversations with your people.
And it didn’t work because leading remote teams is more than having conversations online with your people. It requires a whole shift in mindset and a shift in how you work, because it’s not just transferring how you worked in person to online. So then I thought, should I publish it in management? Cafe? And then I thought, you know what, leave it.
There was another one from someone who and this is a very different kind of thing, because I was in contact with a company regarding publishing some content with them, and then afterwards they say, oh, by the way, this show that we are promoting, in a way through our through our program would you like to interview our founder? And I said, yeah, okay, let me think about it. So I researched them and I listened to some interviews with other people and they sounded great, they were interesting. They didn’t sound salesy at all, which is the problem with a lot of founders of companies that they sound like they’re trying to sell you their product all the time.
So I said, Excellent. Let’s do it. And when I got to it, I just could not get them to sound like a guest.
The conversation was about learning, but they focused on how you learned through using their product, not on the wider implications of learning, especially in remote organizations. And I couldn’t get him to see beyond his product, really. So there you go.
That was more me not being able to click with them. And it’s happened recently as well. And hopefully I’ve saved it.
Just not being able to steer the conversation in a way that I think is going to fit in with the show and the topic. Well, I’ve got other things I wanted to tell you about, but I’m going to keep it short. It’s going to go over ten minutes.
It’s about chemistry as well. And there’s a couple of things here that I want to summarize. I’ve told you about three examples and there are some more, but these are different examples of why it didn’t work.
I haven’t told the guests that their interviews are not being published. I am such a coward. And also, it’s difficult to explain sometimes because at the end of the day, somebody else might listen to the interview and say, they’re fine, publish them, but it’s my show and it’s a gut feeling, and I could be wrong.
Sometimes I have to say that I’ve not enjoyed an interview live with a guest. And then when I’ve listened back and edited it, I’ve gone, oh, okay, this is actually all right. So there is that as well.
But I haven’t told them. And this is a shame because other people have. And I want you if you’re interested in this kind of thing, and if you are really interested in podcasting, I want you to refer you to episode 21 of this show, Adventures in Podcasting, with Myriam Hadnes who is a facilitator, and she talks about this.
She talks first about how she has chemistry sessions. As in, she meets her guests first, starts talking to them, and then asks them questions. And then at the point where she asks something and she gets really curious about it, she stops the conversation and says, right, let’s set a date for recording, because it’s the point where she knows enough and there’s something that she wants to explore during the conversation.
Sometimes she’s got to the end of those chemistry conversations and said, you know what, I don’t think now is the right time for us to record together and that’s it. So if it’s been that she’s been pitched, she might say, get in touch later with another suggestion or whatever. I don’t do chemistry conversations because I just say, well, it’s a gut feeling whether it’s going to work or not, and then let’s just hop on the call and do it.
And that’s different approaches. But something else that Myriam also does is she will tell people that she didn’t think that. I can’t remember her exact words, but if she decides that an interview is not going to be of value to the audience, she will just let the person know.
And of course, it just happens. It should never reflect badly on the person. To be honest, I’ve done quite a few interviews that haven’t aired. Most of them, I think almost all of them. All of them, but one has been because the show never aired or because the host never got round to it and then they closed the show.
So that also happens. And I know one of them, the person brought me in to talk about something that I didn’t talk about and that actually I didn’t think was the right thing to be talking about. So I’ll leave it there and I think that was a good show.
And I think that he made the right decision that he didn’t get what he wanted from me. Again, he never told me that he wasn’t publishing it, and that is okay as well. So I think that is it.
What I did want to start doing with these podcasts is just to let you know what I’m listening to in case it’s interesting to you. And when we were doing En clave de podcast, which I will talk about in some episode with Craig Wealand, we used to interview podcasters in Spain. And at the end of the show, we always said, have you got three podcasts to recommend? And that was really useful because, well, it got me finding different shows and we might have even brought people in to talk about their shows from those recommendations.
So I’m going to start with Death of a 1000 Cuts with Tim Claire. Now, this is not going to be to everyone’s taste. Well, one, it’s about writing, but in a quite holistic way. Tim Claire is a poet and a writer. And I came across this from someone else, Penny, who I was talking to about the fact that I love writing and podcasting. And she recommended this.
The reason I want to recommend it is: he’s really good at, in a way, doing what I’m doing here, which is just doing a solo show and a little bit stream of consciousness. I love that. I really, really enjoy listening to those from him because, of course, it’s on a topic that I like, but he goes off on all kinds of things and it’s quite interesting.
Mind so Death of a Thousand Cuts, I think the last episode he published was around June 2023. I’m not sure why he stopped and maybe that is well, that’s actually a topic for another day. So, people, it has been wonderful to have you here on day four.
My name is Pilar Orti. This is Adventures in Podcasting. Until tomorrow.