clips from podcasts and guest interviews

the short version

find clips now works on every finished episode, not only the ones with your face in them. podcasts make clips. guest interviews make clips.

same button, same share tab, on the web and the phone. a podcast's clip is its card with the line as the headline and both voices captioned. a guest interview's clip is the two of you stacked, you above, your guest below.

and like every other episode, they make their clips on their own once the file is finished. you do not have to press anything.

why podcasts needed this

a podcast is the episode you make when the camera is too much: in the car, on a walk, at the end of a long day. it is often the most honest one in the series, because nobody is performing for a lens.

and it was the one with no way in. a feed does not play forty minutes of audio to a stranger. it plays fifteen seconds of something they can see. so the podcast went to the feed and to your page, and almost nobody new found it.

a clip fixes that the way it fixes a video episode. it is an advert for the whole thing, made from the whole thing. it stops a thumb, says one thing well, and points at the episode.

what a podcast clip looks like

• your episode card, in your brand: the episode label in your accent, and the clip's opening line as the headline, so a muted viewer knows what it is about before a word is heard.
• the bars across the middle, moving to the voices, so it reads as sound, not as a still.
• both voices captioned along the bottom, your co-host's or interviewer's a shade quieter than yours.
• no question read out in front of it. a clip opens straight on the line that matters.
• the same quiet music bed as your other clips, if music under clips is on, dipping whenever anyone speaks.
• the card at the end that says where the full episode is.

the pauses, ums and stumbles are taken out the same way they are for a camera clip. the words stay yours, in the order you said them.

why guest interviews needed it more

a guest interview is the episode with the most reach in it, and most of that reach belongs to the guest. their audience is the one that has never heard of you, and the thing they will share is the bit where their founder said something good.

that bit is the clip. so in a guest interview, the finder reads both of you, every line marked by who said it, and it may open on your guest's answer and carry it. it often should. it never opens on a question.

until now the manual said to clip an interview in whatever you clip with. that was an honest answer and a bad one. an hour of two people talking is exactly the footage a founder never gets round to cutting.

what an interview clip looks like

• the two of you stacked in a vertical frame, you in the top half, your guest in the bottom half, each filling their half. the interview's own file is side by side, which a phone shrinks to two letterboxes; a clip does not.
• cut from the two recordings themselves, each made at full quality on its own side of the call, not from the call.
• the guest lined up with you by the delay the call measured, the same way the full interview is.
• pauses where neither of you spoke taken out, both voices together, so nothing is cut while someone is mid-word.
• both voices captioned, word by word, and the opening line big on screen for the first seconds.
• the end card pointing at the full interview.

nothing is reordered inside a run of what was said. a clip may open on one strong line from elsewhere in the conversation and then play an unbroken stretch, the same rule as every other clip.

how many

the same as any episode: about one for every three minutes, at least one, at most five. an hour-long interview gives five, ranked, the one most likely to do well first.

posting them

under each clip: post as a short on youtube, beside the full episode with a link to it; post to instagram as a reel with its own cover; post to linkedin; post to x; post to tiktok, which asks tiktok's own questions first, who can see it, comments, duet and stitch, and whether it promotes a business, then becomes view on tiktok once tiktok has processed it.

for a guest interview, send your guest the clip of their best answer. it is the most useful thing you can hand them, and it is the reason they agreed to come on.

what it will not do

• change the episode. the podcast and the interview stay exactly as they are.
• put words in anyone's mouth. only what was said, exactly as said.
• bring back a line you struck from a podcast's cut.
• show you what is trending. that read steers which moments are chosen, in the background, and never reaches you or your interview.