Your interviews are better than you think (and worse than they could be)
I've been watching video interviews I've conducted with ghostwriting clients and profile subjects. Watching yourself on tape is uncomfortable in ways I didn't expect.
I ask long, multi-part questions. More than I realized. A two-part question usually gets you half an answer, and a three-part question gets you the one the subject felt safest giving.
The question that gets the best results? "What lie did you tell yourself for years that you finally stopped believing?" I've used it in every interview since I noticed it was working. It almost always produces a story.
Something else: I used to facilitate negotiations classes with super-agent Ron Shapiro and Mark Jankowski, who used the word "probing" to describe the process of asking thoughtful questions. When I used it while explaining my process to a woman, my boss at the time sent me a snarky note. I thought she was wrong (partially because of how she delivered the criticism), but the tape made me think. Watching the video doesn’t tell you the answer; it makes you stop and look. Use it that way.
Most interviewing advice focuses on what happens before you hit record. Research the subject. Write better questions. Build rapport. Come prepared.
That's all useful. And none of it is the real problem.
The real problem is what happens after the interview ends. The recording goes to Descript or Riverside, someone uses AI to write a summary, and the team moves on. Nobody watches the tape. Nobody asks what we almost got. Maybe you extract a 30- to 45-second clip for social media.
That's where the work lives. In the almost.
The Tape Room
A few months ago, I created something called The Tape Room for content teams and partner-management teams. The name comes from sports teams that watch the previous game. The concept is simple: You watch a recorded client or customer interview together, with a structured guide, and you talk about what you saw.
Not to grade the interviewer. To see things you don’t see alone.
What surprised me wasn't how many mistakes showed up. It was how consistent the patterns were. The same moments happened across different interviewers, different clients, different topics:
A client drops a story. The interviewer says "interesting" and moves to the next question.
A client says something that contradicts the company narrative. The interviewer doesn't follow up.
A silence opens up after a strong answer. The interviewer fills it immediately, and the thing the client was about to say disappears.
That last one is the one that costs you the most. The best material almost always lives in the pause.
Why Teams Don't Do This
Watching your own interviews is uncomfortable. Most people avoid it for the same reason most people avoid watching themselves on video: You hear every filler word, every missed opportunity, every moment you were thinking about the next question instead of listening to the answer.
That discomfort is exactly why it's worth doing.
You want to remove egos. Start with someone who did a great interview. If you have someone who’s overly critical, schedule that PITA to be the next one to present their interview.
The teams that get better at this work faster. They extract stronger quotes from the same amount of interview time. They write posts that sound like the client actually said them, because they caught the specific moment when the client actually did.
The teams that skip it write good paraphrases of what clients meant to say. There's a difference.
What the Guide Covers
I built a one-page viewing guide for The Tape Room. You can download it here. It's designed to be used while you watch, not before. Print it, open it on a second screen, or share it with your team before a group session.
Three sections tend to produce the most conversation.
Questions. Leading questions (ones that contain their own answer), bundled questions (two or three packed into one), questions that get one-sentence answers because they were too narrow. A question that got a one-word answer is almost always the question's fault. This is where most interviewers have the most to learn, and where the patterns are easiest to spot on tape.
Follow-Up and Depth. Did the interviewer go two or three levels deep on a single thread, or collect surface-level answers and move on? Were there asks for specific names, dates, numbers, the exact words someone said? The hardest one to watch for: the moment where the client said something surprising and the interviewer let it pass. That moment is in almost every tape.
Listening. You can see this on tape in a way you can't always feel in the room. Is the interviewer reading ahead while the client is still talking? Do they hold silence after a strong answer, or fill it the moment it opens? Reading ahead while someone is still answering is the thing almost everyone does and almost no one notices until they watch themselves do it.
The other two sections — Rapport and Content — are in the download – no email required.
How to Run It
You don't need a formal session to use this. A single person watching a recording in advance with the guide open gets value from it. But the group version is where it compounds. The format is simple.
The person who ran the interview takes two minutes at the start. Who was the client, what were they trying to learn, what did they feel went well or badly. Everyone else listens without interrupting.
Then you watch. Everyone fills out the guide as you go. Timestamps, checkboxes, quick notes.
Then you talk. Not about the interviewer's performance. About the tape. What did you see? What almost happened? What's the most usable moment, and what would you have done to get more of it?
One hour, once a month. You're reacting to something real instead of reconstructing it from memory. That's a different conversation than most teams are used to having.
The Thing Worth Knowing
There's a version of this work that's about getting better quotes for posts. That's true, and it's a real outcome.
The deeper issue is what you're feeding the prompt in the first place. A founder who gives you 40 minutes of surface-level answers and safe observations — because nobody stayed on a thread long enough to get anything else — produces a certain kind of content no matter how good your tools are. You can prompt your way to a cleaner version of what you got. You can't prompt your way to what you didn't get.
The transcript matters more than the prompt. The only way to get it consistently is to understand what creates the conditions for it.
That's what The Tape Room is for.
Download the one-page guide here
Peter Osborne is the founder of Friction Free Communications. He helps B2B founders and CEOs in financial services, fintech, and analytics replace Brand Garbage with writing that holds up when stakeholders and customers read it.
