I’ve spent a fair amount of time pondering what’s going wrong with my podcast, and I think I have a hint. Which kind of sucks, because now I’ve had A Thought, and The Thought is getting in the way of my doing another one.

If you listened to the last one, you know it ended on kind of a weak note — my pondering the point of it all, what I want out of it, blah blah. So to help me figure out what’s going on in my own head, I went back and listened to all of them again. Actually, at first I listened because I wanted to pick up all the parts where I said “some time I will talk about X”, and then never actually talked about X, so I figured I’d get those together and proceed with those topics for the future.

But as I did that I was noticing a theme. Even aside from topics I said I’d revisit — my trip to England, my stint volunteering at the comics expo, et cetera — one thing that kept coming up was my saying “I’ll have to interview X on the podcast.” I’ll give myself the major triumph that was having my boss on the podcast — man did I not enjoy listening to that again — but aside from that (and the no-risk event of recording a call with my parents), I’ve had no one else on the thing.

I gotta. That’s what I have to do, both for the quality of my product and the quality of my own self. It’s the direction of the podcast that has given me The Thought — I think I’ve tapped out the interesting parts of talking into a mic by myself, and now I need to record with other people. But I just cannot bring myself to get that done. But now The Thought has gotten itself hooked into my personal pride, and if I record the next podcast without interviewing someone, my brain’s gonna call it a fail.

So all I have to do, then, is get over my fear of exposing myself to ridicule or rejection. And man have I never had luck with that. I wanted to interview Debb before her Ironman, and geez, it you want to talk about a no-risk proposition, that’s one right there, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. Though partly that’s because I am also overly sensitive to being an imposition to someone, and knowing that Debb’s very shy and wouldn’t really want to talk into a microphone, that’s making it hard for me to do that as well. I had four separate opportunities to record a conversation with her and I wussed out on each one.

So I have to force myself into personal growth or decide I’m done with the podcast. Neither of those things I want to do. But if I had to pick, I’d bet the latter would be more likely.

ah, sigh. Well, though anyway here’s who I would like to interview.

- Debb: I had a separate Thought about her a few months ago. Once I realized how awesome her Ironman training was, I was pretty much locked in to interviewing her at some point.
- Toby: friend in the UK, but behing six timezones away has made organizing that difficult. Which is a shame, because I’m pretty sure we could just straight banter for a half hour and make it fun.
- Steve: coworker from years back, sounded into the idea of recording, said he’d call me when he has some spare time to do so. But he hasn’t called me back, and with my irrational fear of being an imposition, I’m not able to follow up.
- Other Steve: coworker who quit from my current job, who is drastically extroverted, so I’d be fascinated to try to get his perspective on what that’s like. He called me yesterday out of the blue, which was nice, but it was just because he wanted tech help, which was not. I may tell him the price of my help is letting me interview him.
- Brian: a SpinnWebe fan and one of the few people who actually left a voicemail on the KBA line. I’ve generally been weird with talking to fans, and now even moreso because I don’t feel like I deserve any.
- Ricardo: This would be a tough one. Guy at work who I talk to a bit, he’s clearly funny. In fact he originally came to Chicago in order to try to get into the comedy scene. But we’re only a little farther along than “hey howzit goin’” hallway greetings, so asking him to do that would be really weird. But a major win for me.
- Jim Brownfield – Now that would also be tricky. He’s a libertarian who’s on my Facebook, and we generally don’t agree about the Way Things Work. So if he had the tolerance for it I would like to have a political/sociology discussion with him, but I am really only confident doing that kind of thing in text, because when I do it realtime I am in way too much danger of trying to come off sounding like I’m the Voice of Wisdom when in fact I am just talking out my ass. But that could possibly be interesting.
- My bastard friends: Hey I actually directly asked a few of them which is cool. Usually I will just throw the idea out there and hope someone offers–oh hey actually come to think of it I was doing that for months already. Well I finally ased, and I got a few lukewarm responses, I think because we’ve been talking in text for so long that talking voice could be kinda weird. Which could just be my brain being paranoid again, but in any case it’s also decided that they’re not that into it and asking again will be another imposition. Soooo dunno. We’ll see.

Not a bad list and worth a lot of material, I’m sure. Now all I have to do is become an entirely different person.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 19th, 2010 at 12:50 am and is filed under Fine soul powder, Keep Being Awesome, Pointlessly personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.