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Eugene Ahn interviews yours truly on this week's installment of his podcast, The People You Don't Know. While I was already an admirer of the show — I can't get enough of (a) interview media and (b)
hearing about people I don't know but should — I came away from the
conversation more than favorably impressed with his
super-conversational, high-curiosity hosting skill. My brief, sketchy
notes about the topics we cover follows:
- Making an internet thing while avoding the "geek" route
- Desperately trying to get on the geek route (in childhood)
- Podcasters' rebellion against the typical public radio persona
- The role of opinion and the existence or nonexistence of objectivity in media
- Growing up a radio fan, sort of
- How, exactly, I got myself into hosting three different shows
- Interviewing by not thinking about interviewing
- The elusive "super-awesome" questions
- The tragic tackiness of commercial radio
- How the components of ideas (like those for Barely Literate's) align
- Actually reading the books of the authors one interviews and finding the time to do it
- The noise in our society and the necessity of creating places without it (and with good conversation)
- Art as possible-world-building
- Breaking the mental block to pull value from discussions of mundane-seeming subjects
- The critical importance of curiosity and connection
Subjects I ran my mouth too much to cover: film, filmmaking and "The Humanists"; music production; the unholy monster than is my Twitter account; my pathetic struggle to learn the Korean language.
Also, erratum: I mistakenly called KCRW the "most popular" public radio station in Los Angeles. Actually, I believe KPCC has more listeners by something like an order of magnitude. KCRW's got a much higher public profile, though.
