[chris] Notes on Round Three

When the Round Three challenge was announced I was very excited, knowing that it would yield some pretty great entries. The first thing I had to figure out was, of course, who to interview. I have some interesting friends and acquaintances to whom I would have naturally turned, but the rules stated that we had to interview someone we didn't know. As a somewhat regular guy without any clout with which to attract a famous (or even semi-famous) person, I turned to my friends to see if they could suggest any non-mutual friends whose story would be of "national interest" (another requirement of the challenge).

Some good suggestions came up. Several musician friends had connections with some of the bigger musicians in the Austin scene, any of whom would have probably made for a fine interviewee. Another friend referred me to a young man who's been doing some really interesting work with eco-reclamation in Costa Rica, however he turned out to be in Costa Rica at the time. Leslie Cochran, Austin's locally famous g-string clad vagrant transvestite and three-time mayoral candidate was mentioned, and I had actually been thinking about asking him, but since I used to see him at the motel quite often and since we hang out at the same coffee shop I wasn't sure if he counted as too close an acquaintance.

As the deadline drew near my wife's friend Alison happened to mention that the author of Discipline, a novel she'd been reading (and couldn't shut up about), lived in Austin. I'd been hoping to start to tie in my show idea (which revolves around books) with these challenges, so I quickly read his book, emailed the author, Paco Ahlgren, and got a warm response that same evening.

Discipline is jam-packed with many interesting ideas, and so I was sure that there'd be no lack of things to talk about. In fact the problem was more that there were too many topics to cover in such a short interview: free-market economics, homelessness, game theory, Karl Popper's "open society", Taoism, teenage drug use, chess, etc. In the end I picked a few topics based on how unfamiliar they were to me, figuring that the audience as well would want to hear about ideas that they'd perhaps not thought about much before. I'd never pondered the possibility of a private currency competing with the dollar, nor had I really speculated about the dissolution of the United States in to smaller republics, and so I thought that these ideas would be a good place from which to start.

I knew it would be difficult to have the first interview of my life -- an essentially live first interview -- compete with the work of a group of mostly highly experienced radio personalities, podcasters, and poet-performers. While I was happy enough with how it turned out, I definitely think my utter newbie-ness came through, even on simple things like how far to sit from the mic (I "ate" the mic a few times, I was later told), how to suspend non-aural communication (eg. the interviewer's surprise at my not being familiar with Poison's lead singer was in response to a screwy face I made), how to gesticulate without loudly slapping my thigh (as is, apparently, a habit of mine), how to make eye-contact with the guest through the obstruction of the mic support, etc. -- I negotiated these minor complexities as they came up, but they still presented an unexpected extra level of mental co-processing and distraction.

What's more, I struggled with whether I should perform a more traditional book-focused interview or to pursue the focus on ideas that my radio show would eventually employ. The show I'd like to produce would revolve around books but would explicitly not do cover-to-cover book reviews. In each episode, I want to explore a different topic and use a few selected books to serve as points of reference. The idea is to have the selected books "talk to each other", and to define and demarcate an arena of ideas in which their viewpoints could do battle. In such a show, ideas found in certain books would take clear priority over the books themselves.

While I couldn't really present my show idea in this short interview challenge, I thought at least I'd stick to the concept of avoiding a straightforward book review/promotion. When I discussed this approach with Paco he was happy to oblige, though having been freshly media-trained by his publisher, he advised me that he would to a certain extent need to plug the book. In the end, I think we hit a fair balance between my desire to tangentially pursue the ideas presented in the book and his understandable need to sell it. In hindsight, though, I think that because this was a constricted challenge about live interviewing hostiness and not a sandbox for some of my show ideas, it might have been wiser to have foregone experimenting here with my non-book-focused approach. My show idea requires ample set up, and the structure of this challenge provided no such opportunity.

Conducting an interview was thrilling, and no matter how I fare in this round I'll take all I learned from the experience and build upon it when I conduct my next interviews. I actually got so swept up in the thrill of it all and felt so unsatisfied with such a wee little interview that Paco and I met the next day to continue our conversation. I brought my mics and laptop to his house and recorded us yacking about economics and physics for some three hours. I was hoping to deliver an edited version of that conversation to Paco last week for him to review, but the pressures of moving and travel have made it just impossible to find a spare minute. Now that I'm finally settled here in Buenos Aires I can get down to editing those files. If any of y'all are interested, the continued interview will be posted on Paco's website after Round Three is over. (Publishing it beforehand would seem unfair, since it would be hard to judge my entry solely on its merits alone if one were to have a smoother, nicely edited alternative echoing in one's head).

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