(upbeat music) Guys, we did it. We lined up our first guest and we have our first shoot here in a couple of days. It's gonna be with Paul Patron. He and I used to work together at LinkedIn. He's an awesome guy, a great storyteller and a very empathetic individual.

So, basically the exact person we're looking for, right? Should be really fun. Another reason why I picked him was just because I know that the vibe will be good, that we can jibba jabba off one another. And so, hopefully the conversation can feel natural and organic and great. We had a pre-call yesterday.

It was 30 minutes and it was opportunity for me to, again, get on the same page with him, kind of walk through the flow. But more importantly, I wanna understand what he cared about. Is there anything that he really wants me to bring up that he can kind of lean into or whatnot?

And he definitely gave me some things, which is great. And I kind of helped him remind him also the things that I wanna kind of cover. So, as we have organic conversations, at least we're kind of aligned to the flow of stuff. I do not know if he's gonna be recording this from his room, from an office, from the, in a conference room.

I have no idea where he's gonna be. So, I can't control his lighting situation, his acoustic or whatever. So, all I could do is say, hey, look, from a clothing perspective, like try not to any weird crazy patterns. Yeah, we'll see. I think when we start filming, excuse me, I'm probably gonna take the first five minutes just to kind of hear audio and make him sit close enough.

I think that I do want him to be closer, ideally, like this much gap in the top of the screen. Like, who knows? We'll figure that out. I'm trying to figure out the tone of these videos and the look and feel of it. I like this kind of this podcast presentation.

I don't know if that works in a one-to-one interview situation. Like if he's talking directly to the camera and I'm talking like this, is that weird? Should the mic be gone and should I just be talking to him straight on? So, I think I'm gonna make a decision right now and I may regret this.

I'm gonna maybe hide the camera from view. And so, it might be more straight on conversation. So, it looks more like we do expect on a Zoom call since we'll be using Zoom. I don't know. We'll have to revisit that one. I think as I go through these videos, the styles may change and evolve over time.

And so, that'll be something. I scheduled an hour and a half for a call. I don't think we'll use an hour and a half. I think we'll probably use just an hour, maybe in 45 minutes. I legit feel bad putting an hour and a half block on this calendar 'cause when you see that in your Google Calendar, it looks like a big block.

And I was like, oh man, that looks, that almost looks like a full day kind of a situation. But I'm gonna do that for now just in case. It's my first one. If I have any like technical snafus, I have time to kind of rectify that. But I think in the future, keeping it to an hour is probably the way to go.

And it's just an hour and a half, just kind of crazy. I'm also leaving myself time at the end to do some quick fast fire questions. I wanted to have some B-roll, some fun videos like behind the scenes. And so, I have 10 questions I'm gonna be throwing his way.

I just try to think of some stuff that were really fun. And so like the one of them was like, all right, you're on a deserted island. You have two choices. Do you bring someone with you and you can bring any item of your choice? Or do you go alone and you bring five items of your choice?

I don't know what he's gonna do. I think for people who are extroverted, they might wanna have a companion. I'm naturally introverted, so no disrespect to my wife. I think I'm gonna go alone and I'm gonna bring five items of my choice of which one of them is probably something that allows me to create fire, like a flint or something.

But anyways, it'll be fun. I think personality will come out. And so that'll be very fun. So yeah, I'll let you know how this goes. I got a few days to prep. I did prep something like 30 to 40 questions. There's no way I'm gonna go through all of those, but I think it was good exercise for me because I had to be smart and I need to get...

I wanna ask smart questions. I use ChatGPT to kind of help me brainstorm. But I think ultimately I wanna ask maybe the four or five smart questions out of the 30 or 20 garbage ones out there. So garbage ones probably being my ideas, not necessarily ChatGPT. ChatGPT is quite amazing, actually.

I ask questions like... So I know his job titles, like he's a content marketer, for example. So I was like, what do content marketing people care about? Or questions to ask content marketers on a podcast. That was literally one of my thing. And it's been some stuff, and I was like, oh, well, thankfully I already had most of those on my list, so I'm kind of on the right path.

But then I would say, oh, maybe I refine that by adding a qualifier like blog writing, or how do you advise someone being a content marketer who is not traditionally a content marketer? Those kind of questions came up. So again, it added a few questions to me, more so it helped me reaffirm or reword some of my existing questions.

But it was great. It also let me just get smarter about his field. So I'm thankful for this era of AI. It just, it boosts productivity a lot. I think I'll be leaning that a lot, especially looking at my roadmap of interviews, and they are gonna be topics that I have a lot less familiarity with.

And so I'll definitely be glad to have any resources I can. Cool, all right, this is where I'm at right now. Next time you see me, my first shot should be done. See you guys later.