Ask the Dumb Question
Be willing to look like a fool, never pre-write questions, and own the outcome — if nothing usable comes out, that's your failure, not theirs.
Three linked moves make the interviewer the viewer's proxy. (1) Be willing to look dumb — ask the naive question the audience would ask, which also relaxes the expert. (2) Never use pre-written questions — listen and ask the next thing that logically follows, so you latch onto what is genuinely interesting rather than marching down a list. (3) Own the result — a dead interview is the interviewer's failure, never the subject's.
- The interviewer is the audience's stand-in — ask what they would ask.
- Willingness to look foolish relaxes the expert and serves the viewer.
- No scripts: listen and follow the next logical thread, or you miss the interesting tangent.
- Responsibility inversion: if the room produces nothing, that is your failure to fix.
Haran, who as a young newspaper journalist was so nervous he hid in another room to make interview calls, found that age removed the fear of looking foolish. Interviewing astronomers and Nobel laureates, he asks deliberately simple questions ("how cold is space?"), then reveals at the end he knew the technical detail all along — the naive framing was a tool, not ignorance.