tonygoodson: Guest Interviews

Monday, June 08, 2009

Guest Interviews - The 3 Moments

Ever since I was a kid watching Parky, then Russell Harty, and now Andrew Denton and Larry King, I’ve loved interviews. Interesting people with interesting things to say. Inspirations. I like the Parky interview style. The guests don’t have to be grilled or caught off their guard, or sensationalised. Just conversations. Interest and curiosity in the guest, and what they have to tell and teach us.

And not just the famous and the stars, but some of my favourites were Barbara Castle, Jonathan Miller, Peter Ustinov, Michael Caine, Bette Midler, and latterly, Paul McCartney talking about his ego. That was Part 1.

Part 2 for me, came just before the start of podcasting, and in fact partly created podcasting. The Chris Lydon interviews. Wonderful political and technological conversations published as mp3 files to download and listen to. This coupled with Doug Kaye’s I.T Conversations, led to a world of mp3 downloads for me. And still to this day, I manually download mp3s to listen to instead of using podcast software to automatically download to my laptop or mp3 player.

Since 2003 I’ve pondered who I’d like to interview. I’ve never had the platform to interview anyone. Sure I’ve podcast on The Productivity Show, dabbled, had some great guests, but I realise I want to go beyond productivity. And I’ve feared and procrastinated for 5 years. No longer.

It’s simple really. All I have to do is list the 100 people I’d most like to interview in the world, and invite them!! Yeah sure, most won’t reply, or will say no, or it will become too difficult. But you know what? At least 5 will say yes, and it will be magnificent.

So I’m starting with a simple website, a banner, and name…The 3 Moments. Why “The 3 Moments”? Well, when I look at the people I’d like to interview, it’s about their journey, their highs, their lows, the ending of something and that “Oh Shit” moment, the Harrison Owen (Open Space Technology) writes about in his book Wave Rider, and how people deal with set-back and grief. If you ask someone to draw a timeline of their life from birth to now, the chances are there will be two or three peaks/troughs, so let’s hear about those things, The Hero/Heroine’s Journey.