Speaking of: Howard Stern (Pt. 2)

I've written before about how fascinated I am with Howard Stern's interview style and how he always manages to get more interesting and insightful commentary out of his interview guests than any other journalist or entertainment personality I've ever seen. As YouTube continues to learn my precise video watching preferences, I'm getting forced into binge watching videos from his radio show more and more frequently, and as I do that, I start to notice more and more patterns about how he gets these uniquely memorable interviews.

One of the foundational principles of consulting at McKinsey is "start with a hypothesis." They believe there's an answer to every question, but discovering that answer will always be an iterative process, so by starting with a hypothesis, you have a single idea to begin iterating off of rather than a bunch of random possibilities in mind.

I think Howard Stern's interview process follows a very similar guiding principle. Many times in interviews (almost to a fault sometimes), he'll ask a question and immediately follow it up with what he thinks the answer to the question is. For example, whenever Dave Grohl talks about or performs a song, Howard seems to ask every time without fail if that song was about Kurt Cobain. It can feel kind of pushy sometimes, but if he would have asked the same question in the normal, vague, and uninteresting way, his interview guests would have sensed the familiar territory and stuck right to their talking points. But by stating what he thinks the answer to the interview question is, Howard is getting his guests out of their comfort zone and giving them something to iterate off of when answering the question, and I think it works tremendously in Howard's favor.

There's plenty of other reasons to love Howard as an interviewer, from his authentic curiosity to his remarkable research team to his "say-whatever-comes-to-mind" attitude. But I think this idea of starting with a hypothesis is both one of the most important differentiators of his show and one of the most overlooked.