JesseThorn

What an interesting question. I think in my case, I'm always about 20-30% on the logistics: what I've got to cover, how it's going, if I need to pivot somewhere else, what I'm going to ask next. The rest is just enjoying the company of my guest. Like yesterday I interviewed Louie Anderson, and it was easy as pie. I just asked him what I was curious about and listened to him be the hilarious genius talker he is.

The tricky bit for me I think is that I get migraine headaches pretty chronically, so often - say 1/3 of the time - I'm either in pain or on medication when I'm doing the interview. That makes it a lot tougher to double-track my brain. But I manage.

First of all, thank you for the compliment. I learned a ton from this. The main things were almost spiritual. There was a point where Katie Couric said, with absolute conviction, that she aspires to make the person she's speaking with the only person in the world in her mind, and vice-versa, for example. Or just being with Larry King, and feeling how electrically present he was. Same with Marc Maron, who's a friend, but every time we talk I am shocked at how kind of emotionally there he is, no matter what's going on.

For me personally, the challenge is more about that kind of thing - risk taking, emotional intimacy, deep engagement - than it is about a particular type of question or preparation.

I mean, I knew that about Ira, so I wasn't surprised there. Ira is absolutely one of my top five personal heroes in my work, and a really wonderful guy as well who has been very kind to me, but he does what he does. I mean, he is a narrative crafter first, everything else second. Not that he would lie or cheat, but simply that his priority is story.

One of my favorite things about Brooke Gladstone is how anti-narrative On the Media is. I think if you spend a lot of time looking at journalism very closely, you see that the biases aren't really ideological, they have more to do with the appetites of the audience, and particularly narrative.

That said, if I was better or more interested in storytelling, I'd be a lot more successful.

Both! It is completely exhausting and sometimes I go and hide in my room, thanks to my weird combo-extrovert-introvert personality, but every year it's totally amazing. It's harder if I have a show or something like that.

We just wanted to make it feel like a cool event that was only happening this summer. I actually think that we achieved that feeling - the audience was much larger than we anticipated, and the feedback's been awesome. Also, ultimately this is a limited project, we're really trying to provide an archive more than a continuing show, so we wanted to get the stuff out there.