Alexis Sugden
My Failed First Attempt At Recording A Podcast
Written on 1st September 2022
In this article you’ll learn what went wrong in my first podcast meeting with a guest and why it didn’t make it as a final episode.
After months of thinking and planning, I felt I was ready to record the first episode of my new podcast “Is This The Future?” where I invite CEO’s and Entrepreneurs to talk about things like their past/daily life, climate change and personal development and to see what they’re doing to build a better future for themselves and the planet.
By the time I’d arranged a date and time for a recording with my first guest (Italian Scientific Engineer and CEO, Davide Tuzi), I’d written a mission statement for the podcast, set up to distribute my episodes on multiple different platforms like Spotify, and carried out a lot of work behind the scenes to make sure I’d ticked every box, along with the help of my “Voluntary Assistant/Producer”, Joly Black.
If you’re not interested in why my first attempt was a total flop, you can Click here to take you straight to Spotify where you’ll find some slightly more successful episode recordings.
What went wrong?
The recording was scheduled for evening time on a Monday and I’d spent a lot of the week before preparing a good bank of questions to ask my guest in the recording and making some finishing touches to the plan and my microphone setup. Once joining the Zoom call with Joly and Davide and speaking for a few moments about how the recording would be structured I started to feel more comfortable with the situation, which I was glad about as I was slightly nervous before the meeting. After that quick briefing I began with the questions, asking about Davide’s past life, education, career paths and his business ventures. After about 35-40 minutes of questions and answers with the guest I closed off the meeting with some final talking points.
Overall during the episode I feel as though I could have improved on making the conversation smoother and flow better, and also trying to develop deeper conversation and more meaningful talking points, nevertheless I was happy that I had just carried out my first podcast interview on Zoom with a guest. Whilst discussing some of these points with my assistant after the meeting, I came to a painful realisation …….. I forgot to press record.
This was possibly one of the most annoying moments of my recent life, and there was nothing I could do to recover the footage or audio of the meeting. It felt as though months of hard work had just lead to this ….. nothing. Although as at any moment like this, it was my emotions doing the talking. I guess looking back on it now, it’s a very funny way to fail a podcast episode, but easily done.
What I learnt from this experience?
In the majority of areas within my life I try to see the positive side of things, and that’s exactly what I tried to do with this failure. Clearly there were lessons to be learned from this, as with any failure, but quite obviously the main lesson I learnt was that it’s always helpful to press record ⏺ when your trying to record a podcast episode. Though there were many other lessons I learned.
Firstly I came to realise that some of the areas of my communication techniques definitely needed improvement before my next recording attempt. Communication is a skill which I have been deliberately trying to develop over the last year or so, and for me to feel as though it was one of my weak points during the meeting, showed that I still had a lot to learn, and a lot to teach myself. On top of that I felt as though my questions didn’t carry the flow of the conversation as much as I would have liked them to, this subsequently meant I didn’t enjoy the interview as much either, despite this, I still got the same learning experience from the things my guest was talking about, which I’m glad about as this was one of the reasons for me deciding to start the podcast in the first place.
Another of the lessons I feel I learned from this experience was that things always seem worse when you let your emotions do the talking. When I first came to the realisation that I had interviewed a guest for nearly 40 minutes and not recorded it, I was genuinely pissed off and angry, and at the time it felt as though it was the end of my podcast journey, before it had even started. Clearly this was an over exaggeration of the situation, as when I came back round to a normal line of thought I didn’t see it like this anymore, as I had still learned from the interview and eventually it didn’t seem to matter to me, but reflecting back on this, I quickly realised how much of an impact emotions have on the way we think and the way we perceive things differently when our conscious brain isn’t in full control. It is now clear to me why certain stupid decisions seem rational in the “heat of the moment”. I guess it’s similar to being under influence of alcohol, you’re aware of the fact that you’re making a decision, but you’re unaware to the rationality of your final decision.
In summary, the experience remained unchanged for me in terms of a learning process, just a bit annoying that I couldn’t release a first episode as soon as I would have liked.
Thanks to Joly Black for assisting the planning stages of this meeting, and a huge thanks to Davide Tuzi for agreeing to feature on my podcast. Click below to take you to their LinkedIn pages and to Davide’s company website.
NEXTON Ideas
Joly Black
Davide Tuzi