Name: How to Interview “Almost” Anyone | Mike Dronkers | TEDxHumboldtBay
Uploaded: 2025-03-05T14:24:50.000Z
Duration: 11 min 23 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

So, interviewing is an art, but I don't treat it that way.

The imperative

Gerund

This is basically a talk about not talking.

I work at a very eclectic community radio station, and we're really lucky.

We've got, you know, poets and drug addicts and nonprofits of every stripe and scientists, like people with job titles like Fluvial Geomorphologist, right?

But the thing is, I have to have this conversation with them, and I want it to be good and meaningful.

I really do, and I want to know what makes them tick.

The problem is, I'm not an expert in fluvial geomorphology, and the truth is, in this life, you get to be an expert in like one, maybe two things, max, okay?

What I want to talk to you today about is how to fake your way through an interview and hopefully have a great conversation on the other side of it, okay?

And the woman who was training me, she's sort of walking me through the building.

I was going to be on the air in a week, and she's like, here's how you do this, here's how you do this.

Oh, and you're going to be interviewing people.

And there's a couple other tricks that I want to share with you.

There's about six little ones and then one massive one.

Don't be that guy who is like, I'm just going to wing it, man.

And I'm looking at podcasters mostly for this.

There's this scourge of people who think that they can sit down and hold their own.

Secondly, it's a little arrogant and vain to think that you are.

Show your guest the basic dignity of a Google search.

I suggest, since that author is coming in and you may not have read the whole book or like maybe even half of it, they're going to need you to know about it.

So what you do is you find interviews they already did and somebody else can do the work for you.

Now, I'm not saying steal their questions because that's wrong.

But I am saying you can use the answers that they gave earlier as your jumping off point.

So what that looks like when you take, you're basically following up on somebody else's questions.

So if that person is on NPR and that person says, well, my workflow goes like this.

You can use that answer and you can pick it apart.

It's like a normal person sets an alarm for 7.05, 7 o'clock, 7.30.

And then they will tell you, well, you know, I did the math is how long it takes me to get to the bathroom and then the shower takes this long.

So 7.05, that's the Terry Gross move, follow up.

Now, if you're going to be finding interviews with people, this is my personal favorite.

And I hope that you remember this and steal it.

When you read in Rolling Stone or some blog an interview, the odds are very high that that interview was done over email.

So they're thinking their answers out, it's all calculated, it's tactical.

You want the verbal things where you get the social cues and the intangibles that they're going to bring to you like a normal human in a normal human conversation where you know if they're nervous and you can help them.

If you know that they're going to be nervous, you can see it and you can predict it, okay?

So another thing they'll telegraph to you in these other interviews that you're listening to, do they speak too fast?

Now the sidebar to that, this is a great thing.

As an interviewer, you really, really want to hear these words.

And if you can find these sort of small time interviews, these verbal interviews that they've done, right?

If you're going on NBC in the morning, you're going to stay up all night practicing.

But if you were going on a high school radio station in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, you were going to phone it in from your car on your way to pick up your kids, right?