Hrishikesh Hirway created a podcast with a radical constraint: one song, deconstructed, told entirely by the artist. The host says almost nothing.
Ira Glass's structure is deceptively simple: "Here's a person. Here's what happened. Here's why it matters." The magic is in the moment where the interviewer is genuinely surprised.
Every subject contains a rabbit hole.
Someone is obsessed with every one of these.
Your job: find that person and pull us into their world.
Your raw interview is audio. Descript turns it into searchable, annotatable text.
Text is data. There are powerful tools to process it.
[ Groups will be assigned in class. Each student reads one. ]
What interviewing techniques did you notice? How did the host disappear?
How did the interviewer get the subject to reveal depth? What was the editorial structure?
What interview techniques from the book are you planning to use this week?
What are you planning to do in your interview that you learned from these examples?