Best For The Business is WrestleZone’s annual celebration of the people and promotions in the wrestling business that made the year better than the one before it.
Chris Van Vliet is one of the most popular pro wrestling interviewers today, but he’s also done some tremendous work in other areas of the entertainment field as well. Van Vliet is a 4-Time Emmy Award Winner, and he did 136 episodes of his podcast, Insight with Chris Van Vliet in 2021 alone. Van Vliet has become one of the go-to people for interviews for talent and fans alike, and he’s someone other people in the field want to interview as well.
One thing that’s noticeable is Van Vliet’s interviews never feel like an “interview” and it’s more like a casual conversation. Asked how he approaches that format, Van Vliet said that he aims to make an interaction with people as natural as possible.
“I think for me, it’s just that I don’t love the idea of ‘an interview.’ In normal life, when are we actually ever having a quote-unquote interview? It’s when you’re having a job interview or God forbid, the police are asking you questions. I feel like in everyday life that’s really it, right? What we have all the time are conversations, right? If you and I bump into each other at a wrestling show or at the mall, I wouldn’t be like ‘oh, I’m gonna say this’ and then ‘oh Bill’s gonna say this next’ and [have it be a scripted dialogue]. We wouldn’t do that right? But somehow that gets lost when we’re having a quote-unquote interview.”
Talking more about keeping things a bit more casual and why that’s engaging, Van Vliet spoke about how easy podcasting has become for better (or worse in some cases). Van Vliet said that he still plans ahead for things he might talk about, but it’s not the only route to take when navigating a conversation on the air.
“Not just in wrestling, but a lot of podcasts in general popped up because of all of us being cooped up at home two years ago. I always say this, the best thing about podcasting is that anyone can do it. There’s no barriers, you just hit record on your phone and go. The worst thing about podcasting is that anyone can do it and the fact that like, you can be the absolute best podcaster or the absolute worst podcaster, you’re still lumped in as a podcaster. I think it’s important when you are starting a podcast or an interview show or a YouTube channel or whatever, just ask yourself why you’re doing it. If you’re doing it because you might have the chance to talk to a wrestler someday or someone that you looked up to, that’s okay, but be honest with yourself that that’s why you’re doing it.
I asked @RealWardlow what he’s learned from working with @The_MJF in @AEW
Check it out on my CVV CLIPS channel:https://t.co/1HcjrA1HyZ pic.twitter.com/WLRNtuj4oI
— Chris Van Vliet (@ChrisVanVliet) January 24, 2022
“I think that’s why you hear that pushback from a lot of performers are like, ‘I’m not doing podcast interviews anymore because I keep getting asked the same questions all the time.’ So, it’s important for me to go, ‘Here’s the 10 or 12 things that I think will be interesting for me to talk to this person about’ but just because I wrote down the first thing first, it doesn’t mean that’s the first thing we have to talk about it. I did learn something really important in radio — I’ve been so fortunate to work in broadcasting since 2005 and I remember when I got my first radio job, I got this great advice from my friend who’s very successful in radio and he said ‘make sure you know how you’re gonna get into it and out of it.’ And he’s referring to a radio segment, how are you going to start the segment and how are you going to end the segment, the rest you’ll kinda figure out. And I’ve taken that same approach to interviewing, like what’s the first question I can ask that’s gonna get the ball rolling or what’s the ice breaker that we can get the chat going with and then we’ll just figure it out from there.”
Van Vliet was asked what advice he had for aspiring journalists and media personalities hoping to find their way in the field. He said that defining your goal and figuring out how to get there is a big key in that, but paying your dues and working hard along that road is just as important.
“I would say, figure out what you want to do and find somebody that’s doing what you want to do and figure out what their path was. Your path isn’t going to be exactly the same path as theirs but maybe they went to a school or studied something that can help you. Maybe they wrote for their school newspaper or maybe they interned at a radio station. Figure out where you wanna be and then reverse engineer the path to get there.
“Also, don’t be afraid to pay your dues, to work hard, work for free,” Van Vliet said. “Don’t be afraid that like just because you started last week or last month that you’re not going to get into it. I was an intern that drove 60 miles each way while working my high school job in the fish department at a pet store to pay for the gas to get back to my job and that internship ended up getting me a job one day. So, pay your dues and you’ll figure it out.”
Check out our full video with Chris Van Vliet at the top of this post, and read about the rest of this year’s nominees by clicking the link below:
Read More: Best For The Business 2021: Pro Wrestling’s Most Influential People, Promotions and Brands
