The days of spending one to $3 million on TV pilots that are never seen by anyone except a couple of executives. Those days are for the most part over, especially for talk show. So rather than think in terms of pilot, my advice to you is, let's just do the first show. Get a guest, maybe it's not the biggest, most famous guest, you can get your hands on. But let's get a guest. If you're ever going to have an audience, bring an audience.

Whatever it is you envision for your show, let's go ahead and do it. You've got to get your technical crew together. And by the way, I've given you a few technical notes, but this is not primarily a course on the technical production aspects of hosting. It's more on how you can talk to be seen as a good host. And let's just record the first show. If you're going to have an opening monologue, if you're any sort of an entertainment show, you've got to make it really funny.

And that's why someone like Jason Leno did thousands and thousands and thousands of hours of stand up comedy before he ever hosted his first talk show. If you're not going to do entertainment, that's okay. Maybe you don't need an opening monologue. But if you're going to, for example, have a political talk show like a bill o'reilly show, he has his Talking Points Memo at the beginning of the show. So you may want to get that ready. Now, you can do this by looking at cue cards.

If you're sort of an old fashioned Tonight Show type of person David Letterman style, or you can use a teleprompter or you could just talk to the camera. Some hosts are great at just having thought about what they want to say and speak in an ad lib sort of like others are reading teleprompter. Now. Someone like Jon Stewart, a hybrid of comedy show and a new show is heavily heavily scripted, very written, rewritten, edited, sliced, diced, tested in practice. That takes a tremendous amount of talent, resources, money, and staff to do that. But you don't have to do that.

Again, your talk show could simply be a quarterly show interviewing executives at your company about the latest product developments. You might not have any teleprompter fancy monologue, it's just, here's Jim who's head of our New Products Division. Today we're going to talk about the it could be as simple as that. But I want you to figure out what your show is like. And I want you to just get something on tape. And that will be our starting point.

Something beats nothing. No one was born a talk show host. No one was naturally good at it their first time. You get good at it by doing it, but there are ways of getting much better, much faster. And that's what we're going to get into now. So figure out what you're going to do and for right now.

You could interview one family member and your son or daughter simply hold a cell phone camera and capture it. That's okay. But I want to get a sample of what you're actually trying to do. Is it in depth interviews? Is it just a quick summary of the top movies? What is it?

Let's get something down on video. So we can look at the whole thing and look at how you're coming across. Ultimately, if you want to have a successful talk show, much of it has to do specifically with how you host there are some exceptions to that rule, I should say. Jerry Springer, famously says that he doesn't even watch his own show. He's never watched the whole episode. The topics don't particularly interest him.

He doesn't really say that much on his show. And yet he's had a wildly lucrative successful career. That's a typical, most shows successful or fail based on the personality, the strength, the communication skills of the host. And you can be really famous. You can be Chevy Chase, there's all sorts of famous celebrities who have tried their hand at hosting talk shows, and failed miserably. And yet there have been people who were not known at all who've been huge successes.

You look at most of the host on the Fox News Network. They weren't famous before they started hosting at Fox News. So there's no one set rule. But ultimately, the success of your show if you're really defining it in terms of building a bigger and bigger audience, closer relationships with sponsors or whatever it is you're trying to do, it does need to come from you being a good host. So record your first show, and it can be just one segment. It can be a five minute interview with someone record afford it and watch it.

Tell me what you like and don't like I want you to really examine it. Come up with a list of everything you like about how you're coming across. Come up with a list of everything you don't like. Let's do it now.