A fan of Randall Munroe’s brilliant webcomic xkcd? Well, today we’ve got an exclusive interview with the stickmeister himself, just in time for the release of his first book: Volume 0 recently published by our friends over @Breadpig.com. Plus, we’re going to give you a chance to win a free copy of the book! (stick around and see details at the end of the post) But first, the interview…

DI: For the ignorant among us, or those too lazy to check out your Web site: what’s the deal with xkcd? What’s it stand for and why do you insist on making me feel like a moron who can’t figure out how to pronounce it?

RM: I can’t pronounce it either, although I once saw someone argue that linguistically, each letter is silent. As for where it came from, sometime back in 1999 I picked a set of random letters to which to stake my claim, so that it would always mean what I wanted and nothing else. So I wanted something with no pronunciation, something that didn’t make an acronym, and which didn’t look like any other word. And something which was short, so I could type it fast!

DI: I heard before you became Digg and Reddit’s most famous cartoonist, you were working on robots at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Virginia. Um, honestly?

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Chances are, you’ve heard of Mitch Albom, or at least one of his hugely best-selling books, Tuesdays with Morrie or The Five People You Meet in Heaven. Or maybe you saw one of the movie versions of those books that he helped write. Or maybe you’ve read one of his sports books, like the biography of football coach Bo Schembechler. Or, if you live in Mitch’s hometown of Detroit, you might know him as that famous ESPN guy walking around town, covering sports. Even if you don’t think you know Mitch Albom, you probably do. He does a lot of philanthropy, a lot of writing, and seems to be everywhere, all the time.

Well, guess what? Today, Mitch is on mentalfloss.com! He’s got an amazing new book that just came out last week called Have a Little Faith, and we were lucky to get on the phone with Mitch to talk about it for 20 minutes. But wait, there’s more! We scored a couple free copies of Have a Little Faith, which we’re going to give away at the end of the interview below. So be sure to read carefully, because, as you know from past Creatively Speaking contests, the answers to the questions always come from the body of the interview.

I read Have a Little Faith a couple months ago when I got my hands on a galley copy and let me tell you, it’s one of his best yet. A true story, the book centers around two men: One, a pastor named Henry Covington; the other, a rabbi named Albert Lewis. One black, the other white. One poor, the other comfortable. One in Detroit, the other in New Jersey. One nearly died while doing and selling drugs, the other in the process of dying as Mitch comes to know him while writing the book. In fact, that’s how the whole idea for the book came to be: Rabbi Lewis approached Mitch one day back in the late ‘90s and asked him to write the Rabbi’s eulogy. “Are you dying?” Mitch asked. “Not yet…” said the rabbi, with a smile.

After some vacillation, Mitch agreed, even though he didn’t know his rabbi very well. But just like in Tuesdays with Morrie, he started spending a lot of time with Rabbi Lewis, and, simultaneously, got involved with I am My Brother’s Keeper Ministries in Detroit, helping the homeless.

What started as a simple question, “Will you write my eulogy?” turned into a journey, as Mitch rediscovered (and perhaps discovered for the first time ever) a real sense of faith in a higher power.

DI: How much did you, personally, change while writing this book?

MA: I think all books like these are cathartic in their own way because they help you put words to your feelings. It forces you to think about the things you’re doing, and also forces you to learn more, once you know that you’re going to write about people, you delve even deeper into their background—their histories, their families, and things like that. My books, David, are a little different; they’re not done when they’re done, if you know what I mean. They sort of begin when they’re done. I finished writing Tuesdays with Morrie in 1997, but the whole experience is still going on, and changes me to this day, when people feel they can come up to me and tell me about someone who is dying in their family, tell me their thoughts. Those are tough conversations and they change you.

I know that since I wrote this book, the relationships I have with people in the Christian community and in the inner-city community have changed as a result. People want to talk to me about this now, and I want to talk to them. So it’s really the beginning of the process, not the end. I’ll probably have a better answer for you in a couple years.

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Adam Chodikoff at Comedy Central offices. - Photo By Talaya Centeno (for WWD)

Investigative Humorist, that’s what The Washington Post has called Adam Chodikoff, one of The Daily Show’s producers, and its most accomplished researcher. Behind the scenes, someone has to pore through all those C-Span clips; someone has to sift through newspapers and transcripts to find the core comedy elements to the story. The senior producer who’s helped do that since day one of the show is Adam. “You ever seen ‘The Godfather’?” said Chodikoff, in a recent interview, “I’m like the guy taping the gun in the bathroom so that Jon can grab it and come out blazing.”

I’ve known Adam for decades (our parents are good friends), but really only got to know this Made Man through the following Q&A. Fan of The Daily Show? Read on, read on…

DI: Who’d you have to brain wrestle to get this amazing job?

AC: Well, it pays to read the Life section of USA Today. Back in ‘96, there was an article in there about two executives who were leaving MTV to take over Comedy Central. They knew Politically Incorrect was leaving, and at the end of the article they mentioned that they wanted to replace PI with a topical show like “SportsCenter”, but not about sports. Something clicked for me, I found out who was running the yet-unnamed show (Madeleine Smithberg and Lizz Winstead), I sent them a letter, and they called me in for an interview. Now, when I had briefly interned at Conan O’Brien, Conan told a joke of mine on the air in his monologue (another long story) – I had kept the cue card with the joke on it, and I brought the cue card into my Madeleine & Lizz interview as an example of my vast comedy experience. For some strange reason, they hired me as a researcher, and I’ve been wit the show since Day One.

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If you enjoy my posts on this blog, you have A.J. Jacobs to thank. Yes, Mr. Know-it-All was the guy who recommended me to Will Pearson and Mangesh about a year before we all started blogging here. In fact, A.J. was planning to do some more regular blogging back in the early days, too, and was on a lot of our early conference calls as we plotted to take over of the blogosphere!!!! [insert maniacal Austin Powers laugh] (Did you read Jason’s post last week? Clearly we’re well on our way now!)

Anyway, A.J. is one of the few people I know who really follows that Randian philosophy: “There is no competition among men;” we should all be so selfless and upstanding. We should all be so talented, too.

Chances are, you already know a lot about A.J. and his amazing quests to read the entire encyclopedia, or live his life according to all the commandments in the Bible. (If you missed the latter, check out one of A.J.’s own posts on this blog about the experience.)

Today, we’re thrilled to help A.J. promote his fantastic, new book, The Guinea Pig Diaries: My Life as an Experiment – just out in stores now. And tomorrow, we’ll be giving away 5 brand new copies of the book in a fun contest you’re not going to want to miss. But, as always, you’ll better your chances in the contest if you read the whole Q&A below, and really get to know this unusually talented, hilarious mouth breather [his words! not mine!].

DI: I haven’t read the whole book yet, but I really loved all the experiments I read, especially the one where you posed as your nanny and picked up men online, and the one where you outsourced your entire life to Bangalore. I also dug the one where you had to obey your wife’s every whim and command; that one was especially close to home for me. But certainly there must have been one or two experiments that got cut from the book. Talk a little about them, and why they were left out.

AJ: Well, I get a lot of suggestions for experiments from friends, family and readers. One reader suggested I do all the positions in the kama sutra. My wife shot that one down pretty quickly. So not all of them make it out of the planning stage.

Check out this hilarious teaser for the new book!

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In 1988, before the Internet was widely available to college students, Ken Ramberg and his mother Connie, founded a service called JobTRAK. Employers would submit job openings to JobTRAK, who would then fax them to college career offices.

They grew profitable through the ’90s, using the Web, of course, and were bought out in 2000 by Monster. This was ultimately bad news for JobTRAK (which became MonsterTRAK and then eventually died earlier this year), but good news for the non profit world. Why? Because Ken suddenly had a lot of time on his hands, which he used to found GoodSearch with his sister JJ (host of MSNBC’s Your Business).

If you’re not yet using GoodSearch to make money for your favorite charity, it’s high time you started. The concept is easy: every time you do a search online through their search engine (which is Yahoo’s search engine repackaged), or using their toolbar (you don’t even have to be on their site), GoodSearch donates 50% of the add revenue they get from the search to the charity of your choice.

Those pennies really ad up if you get a lot of people naming your organization as the beneficiary. And now they’ve gone and added GoodShop. Whenever you shop online at stores like Target or Amazon (the Apple Store, 1-800-Flowers, the list is endless), a percentage of your total bill goes to said charity. What percentage? That’s up to the store. But some retailers will donate up to 30%!

For some more details, plus an insider’s look at the amazing search company, check out our interview with founder Ken Ramberg below.

DI: After you sold JOBTRAK to Monster, I can picture you sitting around going: okay, now what am I going to do with my time. Were there other, competing ideas? Or did you know it was going to be Goodsearch from the get go?

KR: After founding and then operating an Internet company for 14 years, I wasn’t intending on starting a new business. JOBTRAK was a great success story, but it was a lot of hard work to say the least. However, after reading about the billions of dollars that the major search engines were generating in advertising revenue, I thought, “What if part of that money could be distributed to worthy causes? And more specifically, what if it went to the nonprofits chosen by the users?” It was such an exciting concept that I felt compelled to jump back in.

We launched GoodSearch, our Yahoo-powered search engine, in late 2005 with the promise that 50% of our revenue (which has turned out thus far to be about a penny per search) would be shared with the charities or schools designated by our users. The site has grown quickly and has struck a chord with people who care about making a difference in the world. In fact, 81,000 nonprofits and schools have now signed on and 100 new causes join us each day!

In this economy, especially, when people want to give but may not have the extra funds to do so, we’ve created a way to “give without giving.” As more and more people spread the word, together we have the ability to make a meaningful impact in our communities.

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I first discovered Mike Sacks on McSweeney’s. He’s a hilarious writer, who’s also penned pieces for mags like The New Yorker and Esquire.

Today, Writer’s Digest Books is releasing a new book he’s put together: And Here’s the Kicker, 21 interviews with some of the funniest writers alive, like David Sedaris and Buck Henry. As usual, the _floss has scored a couple copies of the book, which can be yours, IF, you send me an e-mail begging for one. No, IF, you answer the question correctly at the end of my interview with Mike. Now, on with the show…

DI: Humorists and comedians aren’t often funny when they’re not ‘performing.’ Be honest: of all the people you interviewed in this great, new reference book you’ve created, who was the funniest in person?

MS: That’s true. I think most people who work in professional comedy aren’t that funny “away from the office.” It’s too exhausting to be “on,” and, typically, they’ve heard every joke anyway. Their “humor IQ” is higher. That said, most of them have a very dry wit in person, usually quite cutting. The funniest person I interviewed was probably 93-year-old Irv Brecher, who started his career writing for Milton Berle and then wrote for The Marx Brothers. Irv was incredibly funny, and had a fantastic memory. He even remembered his phone number from 70 years ago: Circle 71294. They don’t make phone numbers like that anymore. Sadly, Irv died not long after we spoke at the age of 94.

DI: How’d you pick the 21 writers who wound up in this collection? What was the criteria?

MS: I had carte blanche, which was great. I only asked those writers whose writing I really like and respect. Also, quite frankly, a lot had to do with the willingness of the interviewee to sit down and talk with for a total of five to ten hours (not necessarily consecutively, but over a period of a few days or weeks). There were a few writers I’d love to get for the second volume (if there is another volume).

DI: One of my favorite interviews in the book is the one you did with Dan Mazer, who has worked with Sacha Baron Cohen on all the big hits. As Bruno is opening this week, I thought it would be timely if you’d share a little anecdote from the Mazer interview re: Borat.
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You know him from his hilarious podcast, Never Not Funny, or perhaps as the host of GSN’s National Lampoon’s Funny Money some years back. Or maybe you know him as the co-host of AMC’s Movies At Our House. However you know him, and especially if you don’t, Creatively Speaking is thrilled to have Jimmy Pardo on board today to divulge all there is to know about the comedy racket, and even offer some tips for those looking to break into the bizness.

So without further ado, let’s get right into it.

DI: I’d imagine it’s not really a choice, comedy, because, let’s face it, why would anyone DECIDE to try and make it in this crazy arena. It must have chosen you, no? At what age did you become aware you possessed the power to make people laugh?

JP: I’m told I was always the kid making people laugh… but I would probably say around 12 or 13. I was a short kid who either had to make the girls laugh to get “dates” or use my wit to avoid getting beat up. And yes, it did choose me (as pretentious as that sounds). I had a great job at MCA Records that I left to make $150 a week doing stand-up. Thankfully my price has gone up dramatically since then.

DI: Once you figured out you had the gift, what did you do next to pursue the dream?

JP: I did the usual theatre and choir stuff that one would do through high school, and when I turned 21, I went to my first open mic. I was great out of the box… and then stunk for a long time.
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We’re thrilled to have Joshua Davis in the house today. If you don’t know his writing, it’s high time you checked it out. His latest piece, which appeared in last month’s Wired is a great place to start. A story about one of the most amazing diamond heists in recent history, the piece has been optioned by J.J. Abrams and is now being developed into a feature film (many of Davis’s pieces are in development with various studios).

Davis is also the author of the very cool book, The Underdog (How I Survived the World’s Most Outlandish Competitions). Be sure to pick up a copy after reading our exclusive interview where Joshua talks about how he got into writing, his experiences covering the Iraq war, and the process of turning a story into a movie. He also drops some good advice for those who have an idea to get into journalism.

DI: You got into journalism sort of through the back door, going from fourth-ranked lightweight arm wrestler in the U.S. to author in a blink of an eye (or should I say, flick of the wrist?). What did you want to be when you grew up and how did you finally settle on writing?

JD: I never intended to be a journalist: it happened by accident. I worked a lot of odd jobs in my early 20s – data entry, catering, usher, I ran a small graphics business – and on the weekends made documentaries and films about things that interested me. One doc I made was about a naked bug eating contest in Oregon. A friend of mine going to journalism school proposed that we go together and co-write an article for the SF Bay Guardian. We did and it got published. I think we each got $200 – I was thrilled. My doc just gathered dust on the shelf – I had no idea how to distribute it. But all of a sudden, here was a way to basically do the same thing and get paid for it. It was a revelation for me.

DI: Talk a little bit about your first big break?
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One of the great things about doing this interview series for you all, is that I get to meet all kinds of interesting people busy creating all kinds of interesting Web sites, books, music, etc.

Today, I’m going to turn you all on to my new, favorite video sharing and video storage site, Motionbox.com, which, by my way of thinking, blows the competition away. Started by Chris O’Brien, Andrew Wason and Josh Grotstein, Motionbox allows you to upload/store as many gigs of video as you want, and stream it, as well. (Vimeo and YouTube only let you upload up to 1GB and their HD quality pales by comparison.)

If you saw the little mash-up/film I made and posted a couple weeks ago, that was hosted by Motionbox. (You can find it reposted at the end of the interview below.)

And now, on with the interview with Motionbox CEO Josh Grotstein.

DI: When did you first decide you wanted to create a movie-related site and where did the original idea come from?

JG: Motionbox co-founders Chris O’Brien and Andrew Wason are the true visionaries behind Motionbox. They met at Bellcore (a Bell Labs spinoff), and eventually went on to create two pioneering companies in the online video space: Softcom (in the 90’s) and Motionbox (in 2005). Along with co-founders Douglas Warshaw and Jenn Houser, Chris and Andrew realized that broadband penetration and processing power increases – along with what’s come to be called cloud computing initiatives – paved the way for a new type of service in which everyday home video users could upload, manipulate and edit, store, and share all of their personal digital video “memories” online. The desktop, while by no means dead, was no longer a limiting factor in the personal video value chain.

DI: How are you guys different from YouTube or Vimeo?

JG: Just as the Internet as a whole did back in 1994-7, video on the web is experiencing its “Big Bang” moment, in which a huge explosion is followed by the creation of differentiated galaxies and stars. YouTube, Blip, Veoh, Vimeo, Hulu, etc. are stars of different sizes and shapes and intensities existing in the Media Galaxy. Motionbox is forming in the newer Personal Video Galaxy.

Thought of from a more down-to-earth perspective, Motionbox is to personal videos what Shutterfly is to personal photos. We provide a very safe, high quality, and easy-to-use platform to upload, edit, store, and share your video digital memories. We are not targeted at professional or semi-professional videographers (however, many of them are attracted to us due to our high quality service offering), but rather to the “chief memory officers” of the family who don’t want to learn what AVCHD means, much less learn how to properly transcode files rendered using that format.

Motionbox’s real asset is that we have the best HD format support out there, along with spectacular HD quality. AVCHD, which is a common format taken by most HD camcorders, has been really hard to deal with until now. We allot people to simply upload their AVCHD files with no need to convert them first. The results are pretty amazing.
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Our Creatively Speaking interview series continues today with not one, but two authors who go by the name Charles Todd. If you’re into historical fiction, murder mystery or crime thrillers, you probably already know that Charles Todd is the name for a very successful mother and son writing team: Caroline and Charles Todd. Their historical mysteries revolve around Scotland Yard inspector Ian Rutledge, solving murder cases in England, post-World War I.
Their new novel, A Matter of Justice, was recently released and we’ll be giving away two copies of it tomorrow in a contest that will require you to know some answers from their interview below where I ask the duo many question about the collaborative writing process. So enjoy the interview and see you back tomorrow for your chance to score a great, new novel!

DI: How did Ian Rutledge come about?

Charles—We were visiting a battlefield one day—typical history buffs!—and while there Caroline was pointing out a mystery involved in the battle, and she suggested that we write a mystery where we could explore more than just who killed whom. We talked about the whys and whos and wheres for a while, and then there we were, facing Rutledge. We wanted someone who was intuitive, intelligent, and able to solve a murder on his own, without the aid (or confusion) of the young field of forensics. We wanted his world to be accessible to readers—cars, telephones, a recognizable era. And we wanted him to work at the Yard before and after his four years in the trenches, so that we could see the man before and after.

Caroline—At the time, Charles was married, busy with his career, and often sent out as a corporate troubleshooter to places where he was the ax-man. And so he spent a lot of time in hotel rooms far from home, and he missed his family. Casting about for something that might be interesting for him to pursue, I mentioned the writing concept. We never expected the results to be published, much less attract attention, much less turn into such a wonderfully exciting series to work with. What surprised us most was that Rutledge himself was so popular with readers. Whether they met him in the first book, A TEST OF WILLS, or in the 8th or the 12th, they are loyal and interested in his fate.

DI: How much research about the post-WWI period have you done for your novels?

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