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?

RM: Yup! But it’s not nearly as dramatic as it sounds. I spent one summer interning working on a student-run virtual reality project, and was hired the next year to work on another section of the base on a project building a little R2-D2-sized robot that was serving as a testbed/demo platform for some technologies other groups were working on. It was pretty standard programming work, and I was only there a year or so before leaving to do xkcd full time.

DI: I don’t know how much you know about us _flosser, but we’re on a mission to take over the blogosphere. How much do we have to pay you to put our URL or some branded rat-a-tat in your next comic?

RM: Oh, I’m not sure you want that. I did a comic early on about Cory Doctorow wearing a red cape and goggles while he blogs, and I don’t think he’ll ever live the image down.

DI: Breadpig has never published a book before, so this is quite unusual. Talk a little bit about how it all came about.

RM: Really, we weren’t looking for a publisher. The normal role of a publisher is to give you an advance, oversee the distribution of your book, negotiate with retailers, and take most of the profit. Since the main potential readership for an xkcd collection is already connected to me through my site, I wasn’t looking for bookstore distribution, so I wasn’t even sure I needed a publisher at all. My business partner, Derek, was talking with my friend Alexis [Ohanian] about what we’d want in a book, and Alexis thought he and Breadpig could fill the reduced role pretty well (finding printers and scheduling a basic tour). The idea sounded good to me, so we went with it.

DI: Is it true that some of the proceeds go to charity?

RM: A portion of the proceeds went to Room to Read, which was suggested by Alexis. It’s a great charity which builds schools in countries where they’re needed. The world’s got a lot of problems and I sure don’t have the answers, but there’s a great Aristotle quote that’s something like, “All who have meditated on the art of governing mankind have been convinced that the fate of empires depends on the education of youth.” So education is as good a place to start as any.

DI: People often ask songwriters, “Which comes first? The music or the words?” Likewise, I wonder: Which comes first for you? The setup/scene or the punchline?

RM: It really goes both ways! A lot of the time, when a comic is inspired by real life, it’s the setup that comes first. Someone makes fun of me, and days later I finally come up with a clever retort, and since it’s too late to reply I turn that into a comic. But sometimes I have an idea and I work for a while to figure out how to lead up to it. And occasionally, like in comic #77, I draw a picture I like and then try to figure out a comic to go around it.

DI: Because your characters rarely have distinguishing characteristics–one of the things I love about them, btw–when you’re writing them, are you thinking: “Oh, this is a gag THIS character would say” rather than “Oh, this is a gag THAT character would say”? Or are the generic-looking characters more or less the same person in your mind?

RM: The generic-looking characters don’t have particularly consistent identities, and from looking carefully at comics it’s clear there are several of each. But I try to make sure the focus is on the conversation or the activities and not on trying to figure out how the character who’s talking fits into previous strips.

DI: What are some of your favorite comics?

RM: I read comics by some of my friends pretty regularly — among many others, there’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, by Zach Weiner, Jeph Jacques’s Questionable Content, A Softer World by Joey Comeau and Emily Horne, and Cyanide and Happiness, which is by four or eight different very nice guys. A couple of comics I really like have ended — Men in Hats by Aaron Farber and Minus by Ryan Armand. And one of my favorite comics ended some time ago but restarted — Buttercup Festival, by David Troupes.

DI: Besides other comics, where do you, er, draw inspiration from?

RM: Arguments with my friends, when we’re competing to try to be as clever as possible. That, and my ongoing frustrations trying to get various pieces of software to work properly. The problems I manage to create are notorious for their absurdity — some of my sysadmin friends spend a lot of time doing double-takes. I frequently hear things like, “how did you manage to break that?”

DI: If you could sit down and have lunch with any comic strip character in history, who would it be and what would you want to know?

RM: If we’re limited specifically to comic strips, I think lunch with Huey from The Boondocks would be a lot of fun. We could be angry, nerdy, and self-righteous about things for a while, and then heckle politicians and bad movies together. But if we can broaden the constraints slightly, I’d pick Wile E. Coyote; I desperately want to give him a tutorial on basic engineering and physics vis-a-vis Roadrunner-catching.

Win a copy of the new xkcd book!

Here’s how:

Mosey on over to the xkcd store. Poke around! Then, find the missing word in this tagline: A webstore of romance, sarcasm, ____ and language.

Next, head over Breadpig’s blog. Answer the questions you find there and send your answers, along with the missing word from the tagline, to: AnotherAwesomeMFContest@gmail.com.

Everyone with the right answers is automatically entered into a drawing for the book. It’s that simple.

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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.

DI: When Rabbi Lewis first asked you to write the eulogy, did you know immediately there would be a book in it?

MA: No. I didn’t always know. For the first five or six years, there really wasn’t anything there, book-wise. I was just trying to do a favor for somebody. And trying to live up to what he asked me to do. In fact, I started visiting with Rabbi Lewis in 2000 and I wrote two other books during that time. In fact, he read the manuscripts of both of them. So, if I had been thinking there was a book there, I would have written it a lot earlier.

I really decided there was something to say when I started visiting the homeless here in Detroit. When I saw the religious elements of that, and the pastors who would come preach to them, I saw this world that was totally different from where I grew up. One was black, one was white. One was dirt poor and the other a very comfortable suburb. And it seemed like such a contrast, yet they were unified by this idea of believing in something bigger. And when Henry Covington came in the picture, I thought, well now there’s a face to them—someone who symbolizes these two completely different worlds—completely different from Rabbi Lewis, but yet serene in his own way because of his faith. And I started to see how his church was falling down, Rabbi Lewis’s body was falling down, and I just saw all these parallels and I thought, well, I think there’s a good story there and that’s when I decided there might be a book.

DI: Is there something that you do now, ritually, that keeps you connected to your faith?

MA: Pray. I would say of everything that I’ve changed, ritually, the most measurable thing is praying. I find myself praying when I get up and when I go to sleep. Not so much the formal Hebrew prayers from my youth, but prayers of some kind of a sense of appreciation. I have been overwhelmed by what I’ve seen the last few years. I have a very unusual daily life here: I wake up in a nice, suburban house with my wife, and, you know, we’re okay. And then I get in the car and drive to downtown Detroit, which is falling apart. And I work down there and I go over to the church, which is falling apart—men are sleeping on floors in the kitchen, and we’re scooping ice cream for guys who will tell you they haven’t slept in their own bed in five years. And then, when I’m done, I get in my car and drive back and I go to sleep in my nice house in the suburbs. And I have to appeal to a higher power to understand that. In one day you’ve seen everything and you have to be so appreciative of what you have, after you see how bad it is for other people. More than anything else, that’s what I spend my time doing. Even when I do end up going to a synagogue now, I tend to have prayers like that.

DI: You’re Jewish, but you married a non-Jew, something you say you feel awkward about in the beginning as you’re getting to know the rabbi better. My hunch is, you eventually made peace with this and am guessing your wife’s background ultimately helped you write the book. True?

MA: Most certainly it enabled me to understand Henry’s world because my wife is Christian and a pretty devout Christian. While she doesn’t ever try to impose anything on me, I don’t put any limits on her. And she’s got a big family and we’re often doing things that have to do with churches, and often the conversation is about Jesus, with her sisters and family, you can’t help it. So this wasn’t an alien world to me.

When I asked the rabbi, “How do you account for all these different faiths? How can they all be right? Isn’t just one right, and the rest wrong by default?” He gave this example of trees. He said, “Do you believe that God made trees?” And I said, “Yes.” And he said, “So why didn’t he make just one tree? Why did he have to make a bunch of different kinds of trees? He’s God, and if he’s going to call this a tree, why wouldn’t they all look like this? But he made oaks and pines. Why? Because they’re all varieties of God’s creation. Why can’t you look at faith that way?” And I thought that made a lot of sense. Why wouldn’t I want to feel that way if I’m married to someone who is on a different tree?

DI: How much of the dialogue is made up? Did you record all these conversations?

MA: Almost from the beginning, yes. After Tuesday’s with Morrie, I learned the value of a tape recorder. When [Rabbi Lewis] asked me to do his eulogy, and I came by to visit, I was taking notes anyhow, because I wanted to know where he grew up, you know? I was doing the whole background thing. I really didn’t know very much about him at all. That’s why it was so stunning that he would ask me. I mean, I knew him; I knew him for a really long time. But I’d never had a meal with him. I’d never been to his home with his family. So it was like starting from scratch. I think I did one or two sessions with a notepad, but then I thought, this is stupid, I’m not going to be able to read my notes afterwards. And he was used to working with tape recorders and all that. So I said, “Why don’t we just tape our conversations?” He was fine with it. I did this with Morrie and I loved listening to our conversations later on, and I could see that I was going to enjoy being with [Rabbi Lewis], and so right from the start I recorded him. Once or twice I brought a little video camera over the years and used that, too. But for the most part it was the little tape recorder.

DI: What’s your writing process like? Do you think a lot about what you’re going to say, and then put it down and never touch it again or is there a lot of second-guessing?

MA: I don’t write linearly. I don’t just go, okay, begin, boom, boom, I’m done. I go back and look at it. In this particular book, there was a real dance, because I’m telling two stories. That’s a dangerous thing to try as a writer. Sometimes when you have two stories, you don’t really have one. And I had to make sure that the contrast between the two men was pronounced enough and significant enough. That it wasn’t just two guys sitting and talking, which isn’t going to capture the reader’s attention or imagination. So it was very important to sort of contrast the two lives. One, I was sitting with an old man who was dying; the other was detailing the way in which he grew up. He gives a terrible example of how he’d put bowls of rice on the kitchen counter so the rats would go to the bowls and stay out of the refrigerator. That stood in stark contrast to this old white-haired man talking to me about faith as he was dying. So when you’re dealing with things like this, there’s a lot of constructing and deconstructing.

DI: What, besides the tape recorder, did you learn from your other books that helped you write this book?

MA: Just knowing the kinds of things that my readers are interested in, which are the things I’m interested in—like larger questions that resonate for everyone. I’ve always felt, from the first book, that I wasn’t the story. I never wanted to be the story. I don’t include a lot of history of me that isn’t pertinent to the story. And I don’t include a lot of observations on my part that have to do with me. I try to always think like the reader. I had this great opportunity to move between these two men, something the average reader isn’t going to get—to back-and-forth between these two communities, these two worlds. So, what would they ask? What would they want to know? And I learned that from Tuesdays with Morrie and then Five People You Meet in Heaven, even though it was a novel, was kind of constructed the same way. There were a lot of questions in Five People You Meet in Heaven. He was always asking, What does this mean? And I tried to think like the reader. What would they want to know on these important issues of life. Having done it a few times before, it helped me construct this book.

DI: At one point in the book, you’re talking with Rabbi Lewis about science and technology taking all the mystery out of life. To which the he says “There is always something they can’t explain, something that created it all… And no matter how far they go in the other way, to extend life, cloning…at some point, life is over. And then what happens?… When you come to the end, that’s where God begins” – do you believe this to be true?

MA: I do, yes. I’m somewhat educated. I went through the whole process of trying to logically work it all out. Okay, so we now know that the sun is this; it’s not a sun God, it’s a bunch of gasses. We now know that the earth is this; it’s not the earth God. You know? We figured it out, versus our ancestors thousands of years ago, who prayed every time the moon came out. But, we still don’t know where the moon came from. We still don’t know where the sun came from. We still don’t know where the first atom came from. If you go back to the big bang, what started the bang? And at the other end, as the rabbi said, I don’t know what happens when we’re done. Nobody does. And so, I think at the very very beginning and at the very very end, that’s where faith comes in. And that’s where the idea of God comes in. I not only believe that, I like believing that. It makes my existence here feel a little more significant. I can understand why people might come to the conclusion that we’re nothing more than worm food when we die. But that doesn’t give me a lot of hope. So I choose the other way.

Win a copy of Mitch Albom’s new book!

Below, you’ll find two questions. The answers are hiding somewhere in the interview above. Answer both questions correctly and you’ll be entered into a drawing. We’ll pluck two random winners from the lot and contact you for an address where we can send the book.

1) When Mitch works on a new book, does he write linearly?
2) Who put rice on the counter for the rats?

Shoot us the answers via e-mail here, and please don’t leave them in the comments below. Good luck!

Browse through past Creatively Speaking posts here >>

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.

DI: I can’t imagine what the interview was like. Did you have to watch C-Span and pull possible soundbites out?
AC: Well, in addition to the cue card, I think I brought some articles I had written, and, more importantly, some research I had done for “Campaigns & Elections” magazine after my junior year in college – I had to call candidates from all across the country in the ‘92 election year and find out who the campaign manager was, their pollster, their researcher, etc. I guess the big surprise for me was when Madeline called me to tell me I was hired, she told me that the host was Craig Kilborn, who I had coincidentally worked with when I was a temp PA at ESPN

DI: Tell us a little something about what you were doing before The Daily Show.

AC: Right after college, I interned at CNN in New York – on my last day, they let me go to Tupac Shakur’s perp walk and yell out “Tupac! Any comments for CNN!” Then I was a temp PA at ESPN – CNN and ESPN were like my grad school – learning to work with tape, working on a deadline, coming up with story ideas, working the assignment desk, etc. Then I was briefly at Conan at the beginning of his second season, followed by my first real staff job at a show called “Day & Date”.

DI: The Daily Show’s ratings have soared since you first started. Has the popularity changed the job at all?

AC: No, I try not to pay attention to ratings. I just come in every day and do my thing.

DI: What’s the worst part about your job?

AC: Probably the commute, but that’s my choice – I chose to live in Brooklyn, and the studio’s all the way over on the West Side between 11th and 12th, so it’s a bit of a schlep, but I really enjoy Brooklyn, so I can live with it.

DI: And the best?

AC: Working with comedic geniuses. I’ve always loved comedy, and to work with people who operate at just such an incredibly high level is just amazing. Jon and the writers’ intellectual firepower is astounding – I’ve been there over 13 years, and I’m still constantly floored by their ability to come with these brilliant jokes and concepts.

DI: What’s the one or two bits of research you’ve unearthed that you’re most proud of?

AC: It’s tough, because of the constant nature of the show, it’s hard to remember what I did yesterday. I like finding stuff that just totally neutralizes arguments or talking points. For example, when McCain was on that socialism kick toward the end of the campaign, I wondered if there was any chance at all from the time he opposed the Bush tax cuts that someone confronted McCain with the socialism argument. It was a total shot in the dark, but I started poking around, and I found a Hardball from around that period in which McCain is confronted by some college student whining why her doctor dad has to pay more in taxes – she actually said something to the effect of “Isn’t that socialism?” McCain responded that it’s acceptable for the affluent to pay more in taxes. It was just perfect. Another one in that category is when Dick Cheney said “You can’t go by the polls” to support something he was doing, but I went back and found him on Nightline citing poll numbers to support another thing he was doing. But it’s not just clips, I also like finding facts that the writers can use, whether for a headline, a 2nd Act, or a guest interview. I get satisfaction from breaking down an eight-hour hearing into the ten best highlights that the writers can use, or finding patterns or good set-up lines on the Sunday morning shows. I also pride myself on finding original pieces of research that will be unique to The Daily Show. From my perspective, that’s when the show really shines – when we produce material that is unique and rigorous, it really sets us apart from the rest of the media world out there. Also, part of my job is being able to finds things quickly – the writers work on very tough deadlines, and I want to find whatever facts/clips they’re asking for as fast as possible so they have enough time to incorporate it into their headline joke submission. I also like pitching ideas for Lewis Black or John Hodgman – I really enjoyed pitching having Hodgman do a segment on Mixed Martial Arts. I’m also becoming more active in working on the guest segments – if I can prepare Jon for a counter-argument Barney Frank or John Bolton is going to use, I can go home happy.

DI: When The Colbert Report spun off, was there the temptation to move on and try something slightly different?

AC: No, it didn’t really affect us.

DI: When you’re not working, what are you up to?

AC: Reading, going to the movies, walking around the city, going to the gym. Oh, and there’s my Monchichi collection, but I only concern myself with that when I visit my warehouse in New Jersey.

DI: You’ve probably had the privilege of meeting some pretty cool guests. Any unusual stories about meeting any of them?

AC: Well, understandably you’re not supposed to go down and bother the big movie stars – the guests I’m interested in are more of the Elmore Leonard/Bob Costas/Woodward& Bernstein variety. My most star struck moment was when I met Hank Azaria – I’m a huge Simpsons fan, so I printed out a picture of Apu and wanted Hank to sign it with my favorite Apu line – “Must you dump on everything we do?” When I asked Hank to sign it, he agreed, but he couldn’t remember the line – I had to go through the whole plot of that episode- “Remember when YOU and Homer had to go to India to the world’s first Kwik-E-Mart after YOU got fired? You finally reach the end, you’re almost there, and YOU say “There she is! The world’s first convenience store! And then Homer says, “This isn’t very convenient.” Then YOU say, “Must you dump on everything we do?” Then he said “Ahhh”…and did the line in the Apu voice! Unasked! That was fun.

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!

DI: Which was your favorite experiment to conduct?

AJ: One that I loved was the quest to become the most rational person alive. Sort of a ‘What Would Spock Do.’ Because it made me realize just how irrational human behavior is. And how many of our life decisions are made based on inertia and laziness. Like something as simple as what toothpaste we use. I’ve been using Colgate for 30 years. Why? Because some guy at my sleepaway camp used Colgate, and he seemed cool, so I started using it and never stopped. But for this project, I scrutinized every single decision, and I realized….I HATE the taste of mint Colgate. It’s medicinal. So I tried a whole bunch of different toothpastes. And it was a revelation! I now use Tom’s of Maine orange/mango-flavored toothpaste. And it’s delicious. It’s like eating dessert. Those little decisions make a huge difference in quality of life.

DI: If you weren’t married, weren’t a well-known, respected author out there doing book tours and such, if you had no living family left on earth, what kind of experiments might you have attempted? Go ahead, unleash your inner-nerd, we won’t hold these against you. We know… these are just *hypothetical* experiments.

AJ: At one point, I wanted to do an experiment where I interacted with people exclusively through technology – Facebook, email, IM, etc. My wife nixed that one too. She said, you’re NOT attending our niece’s bat mitzvah via Skype. You are showing up there in person.

I’d also love to read the entire Wikipedia. I’d consider that time well spent. I feel a bit guilty saying that, since my first book was about reading the Encyclopedia Britannica. But I find the breadth of Wikipedia alluring. I spend hours a week Wikitunneling (hopping from one wiki-link to another). I’d never get to write a book about it since I’d never finish.

DI: People have called you a modern-day George Plimpton. Even you refer to the master in your book. Okay, so Plimpton was a great journalist. We all know that. And not such a bad actor. Right? Right. But I’ll still always remember him as the classy face of Mattel’s Intellivision, which I owned (still own!) and worshipped, cradled, slept with, dusted vigrously… What about you? We’re about the same age; were you an Atari guy? Intellivision? What was your favorite game? What cartridge did you wear out first?

AJ: I loved an Atari game called Adventure. You ever see that one? You had to get the chalice and kill the dragons and trap the bats. It was particularly exciting because it contained a secret room – according to Wikipedia, it’s the first video game Easter Egg in history. Players had to pick up an invisible gray dot and bring it below the golden castle, where it would open a room that had the words “Created by Warren Robinett.” And then the gray dot would have sex with a prostitute. Or maybe I’m misremembering that last part.

DI: There will probably come a day when you’ve put yourself through every test there is, and written adroitly about it—or maybe when you grow bored with this wonderful niche you’re creating. Have you given any thought to what you’ll write about then? Do you have any aspirations to pen a novel?

AJ: I don’t think novels are in my future. I love non-fiction too much. Plus I don’t think novels come naturally to me. Though I do think that there should be a novel about Belle Boyd. Hers was an amazing tale I learned about in the encyclopedia. She was a beautiful female spy for the confederacy during the US Civil war — who ended up falling in love with a Union soldier and eloping. A real Romeo and Juliet story. A novel waiting to be written.

DI: Besides Plimpton, what other writers do you like?

AJ: I love Bill Bryson. And Mark Twain. I love Victorian non-fiction, like Confessions of an Opium Eater by Thomas de Quincey. And also David Israel, even though he’s not Victorian. [DI note: AJ, can I use that as a blurb on the back of my next book?]

DI: Talk a little shop for a mo. What’s your process like? I know in one of the chapters you talk about writing 2 hours each day, in the morning. But is that your norm?

AJ: I actually write a lot from 10 pm till 2 a.m. It’s the quietest time of the day for me. I’ve got three young kids, so the mornings are category five storms.

DI: Do you ever get writer’s block? How do you deal?

AJ: I once did some research on writer’s block. If I remember correctly, Nabakov wrote standing up. Ben Franklin wrote in the bath. And the German philosopher Friedrich Schiller used the smell of rotten apples to get him in the writing mood.
So that’s what I want to try: Standing up in a bath filled with rotten apples.
Instead, I usually start writing sentences about any old thing – about my socks, about a glass of orange juice. I know I’m going to delete these passages, but it’s a way to get warmed up.

DI: Many writers say they find the writing process more rewarding than the actual
publishing process. What about you? What’s the best part for you?

AJ: I actually love the research process best. I love diving in and reading all the literature. And I love interviewing people and hanging out with scientists and professors and George Washington impersonators and so on. When I was researching The Year of Living Biblically, I think I became the first person to out-Bible talk a Jehovah’s Witness. He came over to my house and after three hours he looked at his watch and said, ‘I have to go!’

DI: What’s the best thing about being A.J. Jacobs?

AJ: I recently got an iPhone and I now listen to Podcasts on double-speed. So I can ingest an hour of Fresh Air in just half an hour!

DI: What’s the worst thing about being A.J. Jacobs?

AJ: Well, I have trouble breathing through my nose, so I’m a bit of a mouth breather. Mouth breathers get a bad rap, you know?

DI: If you could go back in time and live your life as an experiment with a historical figure, how would that go?

AJ: One idea: I’d ask to be Goethe’s apprentice. He was an 18th century German writer (Faust), but he was more than that. He was the most well-rounded man in history. He was a master of all trades. He was, among other things: a lawyer, a painter, theater manager, botanist, statesman, alchemist, biologer, soldier, astrologer, novelist, songrwiter, mine inspector, clothing designer and irrigation supervisor. I’d love to try to be mini-Goethe.

DI: You talk about your three boys a lot in the new book. If one of the comes to you one day and says, “Dad, I want to be a journalist,” what advice would you give him?

AJ: Have genuine and deep curiousity. Notice the details – how people talk, what places sound like, what they smell like. And don’t misspell the name ‘Wayne Gretzky,’ because his fans will write you angry letters.

DI: Lastly, what’s on deck for you?

AJ: My next project is the final part of my self-improvement series. I’ve worked on the mind (The Know-it-All). I’ve worked on the spirit (The Year of Living Biblically). Now I’m going to work on the body. I’m trying to become the healthiest person alive. No more junk food, not even Graham Crackers – which mental floss readers might know were originally designed as health food in the 19th century by a wacky diet guru named Sylvester Graham who hoped the crackers would, among other things, discourage self-pleasuring.

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.

DI: When Goodsearch went live, how much did it differ from what you’d imagined when you first hit on the idea?

KR: Other than adding the GoodShop shopping mall, which we were not contemplating at the time, GoodSearch is pretty much how I imagined it. What continues to inspire me however is the groundswell of support that has developed around the site. From regular people trying to do good in their communities, to celebrities such as Jessica Biel, Jeff Bridges, Rob Thomas, and Montel Williams who volunteered to make promotional videos for us, the site has taken on a life of its own.

DI: You’ve now added an exciting new feature, so people can raise money for their favorite charities by shopping online. How does it work, exactly?

KR: In 2007 we expanded our concept by creating GoodShop, an online shopping mall which donates a percentage of each sale to the shopper’s cause. More than 1,300 of the very best merchants have joined our effort including Amazon, Nike, Staples, Dell and Best Buy to name a few.

To use GoodShop, you simply select your favorite charity and then click on the logo of any of our partner stores. Each merchant not only makes a substantial donation to your cause, but they’ve also provided us with thousands of money saving coupons and special offers.

DI: So if I pick up some books at Amazon, and the total comes to $40, what percentage of that is going to my designated charity?

KR: 1.5% of your Amazon purchase will go to your designated charity. To give you a few other examples, 7% from each order at 1-800-Flowers, 4% from Nike and 2% from Dell is donated. Other stores and services are donating 30% or more!

DI: What are a couple of the real big success stories?

KR: The successes are spread across the board. The ASPCA has earned more than $27,000, the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation more than $11,000 and Save Darfur more than $11,000.

What’s equally exciting is when a smaller organization such as the Blind Cat Rescue in North Carolina, which has earned $3,500, wrote to us saying how vital the money was to continuing their day-to-day operations. Another cause, the Bubel/Aiken Foundation which helps children with disabilities, used part of the $12,000 they’ve earned to send a group of kids to camp this summer.

DI: Talk a little bit about this cool, new downloadable tool bar. What’s the idea behind it?

KR: Thanks for asking. Our new toolbar makes it so that you don’t even have to come to our site to earn a donation for your cause. This is a real game changer! You can search the Internet directly from the toolbar and when you shop at any of our partner stores, the donation is automatically generated. It really doesn’t get any easier than this.

Our hope is that millions of people will download the GoodSearch/GoodShop toolbar. Don’t let your friends or relatives shop without it!!

DI: Does it work on all browsers?

KR: Right now, the toolbar works on IE and Firefox.

DI: What’s the hardest part about getting people to switch from their favorite search engine to Goodsearch?

KR: Once people see our sites, they’re generally hooked. Everyone has a cause they care about and there’s no easier way to lend their support. Our biggest challenge is getting the word out. We’ve been very fortunate to have been featured in The New York Times, Oprah Magazine, Good Morning America, CNN and other press outlets, however our biggest traffic driver still comes from friends telling friends about us.

DI: What’s next for you guys?

KR: Right now we’re working hard on spreading the word about our toolbar. We’re asking everyone to get their friends, family and workmates to download the toolbar, pick a favorite charity and then do some good when they search or shop online.

Just think of the potential if office managers around the country downloaded the toolbar. When they then purchased their company’s office supplies online at Staples, OfficeDepot, OfficeMax, etc. the donations would quickly add up!

DI: Planing a vacation from all this?

KR: I’d love to say that we’ll be getting some rest soon, but the work that we’re doing is just too important. We’ll keep working hard until the question “Who do you GoodSearch for?” is part of the vernacular.

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.

MS: Sure, here’s my favorite anecdote: Sacha Baron Cohen is a huge perfectionist and very much into authenticity. When he was playing the Borat character for the movie, he felt that the character would never change his clothes. So Sacha refused to change his suit and underwear for months. It was never washed. Also, his underwear had a Russian tag on it, just on the off chance that someone happened to see it. Chances were slim, but he didn’t want to take any chance whatsoever.

DI: You quote E.B. White in the book as saying “analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it.” (I’d add something in there about reeking of formaldehyde, too.) And maybe that’s why the book is categorized as a reference book. But people seem to like behind the scenes docs and such things. Why is it, then, that the poor frog MUST die?

MS: I think it all depends on how the frog is handled. If you man-handle the frog, it’s going to die. If you treat it gently, it probably won’t. So, back in the non-metaphor world, if you don’t approach the subject of humor in a scientific way, but let the experts explain their processes and experiences and advice in their own words, the book will be better off for it. I think, too, that a lot of people who write non-fiction books about humor haven’t necessarily been in that world, themselves. And I think that it shows.

DI: I’ve read a good bit of your writing, and I think you’re pretty damn funny, too (funnier than some of the folk in your book). Did YOU learn anything interviewing these so-called masters?

MS: Thanks, David. I don’t care what Oprah says: you’re not a weirdo at all. Sure, I learned a lot. One of the most important things was that writers at all levels struggle. I think that’s a vital lesson for beginning writers to learn. The craft of writing is so difficult that one shouldn’t feel bad if things aren’t going well. All writers, at every level, have a hard time, and all writers are edited. Nothing to be ashamed of; it’s just part of the difficult process.

DI: In the book, David Sedaris talks about his OCD tendencies. I was expecting to hear some OCD-ish stories from some of the other writers, but you didn’t go there. Were there any patterns that started to develop as you got to know these writers? Things a few had in common?

MS: Well, the only reason I asked about OCD is because I, too, suffer from it. I would say that at least half of the writers suffer from OCD, in some form or another. This was a surprise to me. I actually contacted Dr. Oliver Sacks (no relation, minus mental illness) to see if there was a connection between OCD and humor writing, but he said he wasn’t aware of any. The other obvious connection is, of course, depression, which a very large percentage of humor writers suffer from.

DI: For those of our readers looking to get into comedy writing, or to market the humor they’ve already penned, what advice can you point to from the masters in the book that might help them along?

MS: Network. Write as much as possible. Read as much as you can. Get involved with people who share a similar interest. Be stubborn, but not obnoxious. Don’t refer to yourself in the third person. Trust Mike Sacks on this one.

DI: What’s next for you Mike? What are you working on these days?

MS: I just sold a pitch to Broadway Books this week. It will be a humor book about sex that I’m co-writing with friends from Daily Show, Tonight Show and The Onion. It’ll be released next summer. I will be on the book’s cover, nude except for black socks and a straw boater. This is not what I want, but supposedly it’ll greatly improve sales.

Win a copy of Mike’s new book! We’re giving away two copies, totally at random! All you have to do is e-mail us the answer to the following question, and we’ll pluck a couple and send you the book:

In the Q&A above, an author is mentioned who goes by two initials, plus his surname. What do those two initials stand for? Let us know via e-mail.

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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.

DI: What’s the deal with comedians and Chicago? It seems to be America’s funny bone. Is there something in the water there or is it all Martin de Maat and Sheldon Patinkin’s fault?

JP: I think it has a lot to do with the “second city complex”. Always being the underdog makes one want to get in spotlight and scream “look at me”, whether that’s the whole city or just one person. I would also place some blame on Sheldon’s brother Mandy.

DI: How did you get your first big break?

JP: A talent scout from CBS Television was making the rounds to comedy clubs across the country and saw me perform in Detroit. He then invited me to another showcase in Chicago and eventually became my manager and made me move out to Los Angeles. Three months after I got here, he had a nervous breakdown and quit the business.
I was lucky enough to get signed by an agent a few weeks later and have been working with him ever since.

DI: If someone who never heard of you asked me who you were like, I’d probably say Don Rickles meets Albert Brooks. Who makes Jimmy Pardo laugh? Who are some of your idols? Who influences you?

JP: You are right, Rickles is a huge influence on me, as is Groucho Marx. Johnny Carson is my hero, but I can’t ignore how much Richard Lewis and Robert Klein influenced my stand-up as well.

DI: Talk a little bit about your wife, another hilarious comedian, Danielle Koenig. Is it hard being married to someone who does something so similar to you for a living? What happens if we’re taken over by aliens and they ban all comedy world-wide? Who’ll bring home the bacon and how?

JP: I’m the luckiest man alive to be married to such a funny, talented and beautiful lady. It was hard when we first started dating as I was already pretty well known in the stand-up circles and I never wanted her to be just known as “Jimmy Pardo’s girlfriend’. Now that we’ve been together for eleven years and she’s an established comic and writer, it’s a breeze. It’s great to be able to talk to your spouse about the crap that is show business and have them understand.

Assuming comedy is banned, I guess I could always take a job announcing car lots from the back of a tram at Disneyland. “Goofy, you are now leaving Goofy. Make sure you have your keys!”

DI: What’s the worst gig you ever had?

JP: Oh, I’ve had many horrible gigs… But hands down the worst was in 1991 at The Great Lakes Naval Base just outside of Chicago. I had been there before and it had gone well and was looking forward to going back. The first comic performed and did great, the crowd loved him. I took the stage and for about the first 5-6 minutes was killing. Then something happened, and to this day I have no idea what it was, but the crowd turned on me. I was contracted to do 30-40 minutes and I’m basically out of material after 10, but decide it’s best for everyone if I just bail. I say to the audience “I’ll tell you one more thing and then go.” One of the sailors yells back “Don’t even tell us that, just go!”

I come off stage and the entertainment director is standing there with my coat in one hand and my check in the other and tells me “Get out of here, they will kill you.” I run to my car while being chased by a dozen or so military men.
Obviously, I got out of there okay, but it was the one and only performance that shook me up so much I was skittish to get back on stage.

DI: What’s the worst flub you ever experienced?

JP: I was just a kid of 23 years old performing in Merrilville, IN. The first two acts tried to do their act while a guy in the crowd kept yelling out “My wife is pregnant!”. He must have yelled it out 25 times and was ruining the show. I was the headlining act of the night and after he yelled it out at me a few times, I came back with “Yes, we know sir and seeing how you act, we can only hope she has a miscarriage.” Oddly, the crowd was with me as this guy was so annoying, but afterward I was forced by the resort the club was in to write a letter of apology. I was angry at the time as ‘the stage is mone to say what I please.”

I was just too young to understand how devastating a miscarriage could be to a family and would never think of saying something like that again.

DI: When you’re not busy with your podcast, or touring, or writing jokes, what takes up most of your time?

JP: Well, of course my wonderful son, Oliver. He’s the highlight of my life and every other cliché you want to use. I’m a proud dad and love spending as much time as possible with him. He’s only 20 months now, so it’s not as tough leaving to travel as it’s going to be in a year or so.

I also play fantasy baseball.

DI: What happens if your kid doesn’t like you or your wife’s brand of humor? They may burry the girls in China, but not the boys. Then what?

JP: Being a self absorbed comic, I don’t care if he thinks Danielle is funny or not, but I can’t think of anything worse than my kid not thinking I’m funny. Man, if being in front of a crap crowd for fifty minutes is tough… how bad would fifty years be?

DI: What will you tell your son if he comes to you guys one day and, in all seriousness, says, “Mom, Dad, I want to be a comedian when I grow up.”

JP: Ugh, do you have to? If so, learn from your Mother and write! Don’t follow in your old man’s shoes and rely on working the crowd the whole time.

DI: What advice do you have for those looking to break into the business?

JP: Specifically for stand-up- be true to yourself. Don’t sell out and try and be what you think will sell. I’d rather fail and be original than try and fit an image of what a comic “is”. Other show business? Learn to juggle, I hear variety shows are making a come-back.

DI: Could you have imagined your award winning podcast “Never Not Funny” becoming such a monster hit?

JP: I was just looking for something to do between TV jobs and really hit on something.
I am amazed at how popular it became and after two years we switched to a subscription platform. The listener can still get the first twenty minutes free via iTunes, but if you want to hear the whole ninety minutes you have to plunk down $20 for 26 episodes.

I was told over and over that nobody makes money with internet content. I guess I’ve bucked the trend. It’s just proof that if you put out a quality product, people will pay to be entertained.

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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?

JD: An important moment for me early on was the lead up to the Iraq War. I had done one feature for Wired at that time and a bunch of short pieces. I figured they had a big-time writer covering the war for them so I proposed a short sidebar-type of story about an army unit that created wi-fi networks on the battlefield.

When I submitted the story, my editor told me that the magazine hadn’t lined anyone up yet to cover the war. “So send me!,” I said. Since they didn’t seem to have anyone else, they agreed. I arrived just before the invasion and was refered to as a unilateral, someone not under the protection of the US Military (it was too late to register to become an embed). I didn’t have a helmet or a bullet-proof vest and no idea how to get into Iraq but I eventually figured it out. When I got back and filed a story about how networking changed the way war is fought, Wired offered me a full-time gig as a contributing editor.

DI: What’s your typical process like? Do you go looking for a wild story, or do they fall into your lap?

JD: I sit in my chair for long stretches of the day when I am thinking about new stories. I’ll just sit there and think, hmmm, I wonder if anybody has tried this or done that. Then I’ll google whatever it is and more often than not, somebody is actually trying to do what seemed to me a crazy idea. That’s how I came up with my first diamond story. I thought, “Hmm, I wonder if anybody is trying to make diamonds.” So I googled “Man made diamonds” and found a company trying to do just that.

DI: Once you have the story, is there a lot of outlining? Or do you just start writing and then go back to shape it later?

JD: I spend days, sometimes weeks, working on the first few paragraphs. I re-write those beginning lines over and over and over until I am convinced that they are as good as they can be. It is often very frustrating and maddening but once I’ve locked in the beginning, everything flows pretty well from there on out. I sometimes feel like once the beginning is in place, there is a clear track laid down and it can only move in a certain direction. That’s why I spend so much time at the beginning: I want to make sure that I’m going down the right track.

DI: A lot of your Wired pieces have been optioned for film. What’s that process like?

JD: It is exciting at first but the process of actually getting a movie made seems to take forever. I’m very happy that I have journalism to keep me busy. Ultimately, what I like to do is tell stories and if I had to depend on Hollywood to get something out into the world, I think it would be very frustrating.

Not to say that it isn’t fun to feel like I’m in an episode of Entourage for an hour or two. But then the phones stop ringing and I go back to trying to get people to tell me about their lives.

DI: Do you consciously look for stories that might lend themselves to the big screen? Or are you just drawn to stories with built-in drama?

JD: I like stories that are exciting. I like to hear about adventure and daring-do and bravery. I want to hear stories that make me leap out of my chair and say “THAT’S AWESOME!!” I think people in Hollywood like those stories too.

DI: As executive producer on some of these films, how much input do you have once they’ve optioned it from you?

JD: Since I’ve done research into the world that the film is based on, I serve as a resource for the screenwriter and producing team. Sometimes they want to go it alone, sometimes they want the help.

DI: In your latest piece for Wired, you write about the diamond heist of the century. Talk about how that one came about: Obviously it’s every journalist’s dream to get such an exclusive scoop. Was it luck? A lot of pavement pounding?

JD: In 2003, I was in Antwerp writing the story about the advent of jewelry-grade man-made diamonds. It was soon after the heist and I heard people in the diamond district talking about this incredible robbery. I started researching it then but the police and prosecutors were unwilling to talk at that point. So I continued to research it over the subsequent 5 years. I began to send letters to the men who were arrested for the crime and, in 2008, I received a call from the mastermind. He said he wanted to meet and I scrambled to get on a plane for Belgium as fast as I could. So, after 5 years of chasing it, I got my first break.

DI: Is it hard to break a story in a magazine that has a 3-month lead time?

JD: Good question. In the case of this diamond heist story, I found out that Notarbartolo – the mastermind – was going to be released from jail early. His release would come a few weeks before the on-sale date of the magazine so we decided to put the story on-line before the magazine came out. That’s a very unusual thing for a print magazine to do. They essentially scooped themselves. But that’s better than having someone else scoop them.

What magazines offer is deep reporting and in-depth analysis. That’s something you don’t get in the usual fast-breaking news cycle. But, when you do deep reporting, you sometimes end up in a position of having a scoop and the question is, what do you do with it?

Luckily Wired has a robust on-line presence so that’s helpful. I don’t know what I’d do if I was in that situation at a magazine that didn’t have that ability.

DI: When do you think Wired will be an online-only magazine? What’s the future for pulp publications?

JD: To me, the question is: do people want to read long, in-depth stories on-line? The on-line environment is very distracting. It’s hard to make it through 500 words, let along 5000. It seems to me that there will always be a market for a nice, glossy magazine that offers rich, rewarding reporting.

Digital readers (a la Kindle) might one day change the way those magazines are distributed but I personally feel like they will still exist.

Unless….our entire society dumbs down and stops wanting that level of analysis and story-telling. Hopefully that won’t happen.

DI: What advice do you have for would-be journalists just setting out now?

JD: Well, for people wanting to get into magazine writing, I’d say it’s important to start writing front of the book stuff at magazines you like and respect. Try and build relationships with editors there as you need someone on the inside to advocate for you. Prove that you’re dependable and have good ideas on the short stuff and then step up with a feature proposal.

What’s nice about this business is that the barrier to entry is low. All you need is an idea and an email address.

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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.

DI: One of your biggest draws, of course, is that you advertise unlimited storage space and users can upload files of any size. Where on earth are you storing all this data? I’m picturing a warehouse-size server.

JG: We use a mixture of cloud and “internal” storage, and our internal storage is hosted at network operating centers. Our “mixed” architecture allows us to achieve an appropriate trade-off between high availability and cost efficiency. This in turn allows us to offer a differentiated service particularly to our premium customers.

DI: When a user uploads a video, what’s the conversion process? What happens on your end during the optimization process before we see it?

JG: One of the great strengths of Motionbox is our technological ubiquity. We support more video formats than any other online video service, including AVCHD, which is popular on many HD camcorders. The fact that we support these formats makes it extremely simple for all types of users to upload to the service. As a consequence, users don’t have to pre-transcode any of their files before working with us (which is not the case with most other services, especially for the newer HD formats).

We ingest the video source code in its entirety and, in the case of our premium members, store 2 copies of that source code for as long as a person remains a member. At that point, we transcode the video (again, regardless of its source origin) to a “raw”, expanded format which then gets immediately re-transcoded into several different formats depending on the user. In the case of the premium user, transcoding goes automatically into our “standard definition” format until the user chooses to play a high definition version of the video, at which point it’s also transcoded into HD. The user can also select to have the file transcoded over to download formats useable on devices like the iPod. Net, net –we end up storing multiple copies of each video file.

DI: What about those huge HD files? How do you plan on handling that as more and more HD consumer cams and flips hit the market?

JG: We’re big fans of HD, and truly believe that the Motionbox service shines most brightly (perhaps another allusion to the astronomy analogy) when we’re handling HD content.

That said, as you point out, HD is not without its liabilities, including increased storage costs and protracted upload and encoding time. Fortunately, the economics of our “freemium” subscription trial model allows us to offer a very robust HD product to our premium users, and a “taste” of HD to our free users. Also fortunately, the cost of storage is dropping as fast as upload speeds are increasing. So, we feel comfortable that we can meet consumer demand without sacrificing on our profitability margins.

DI: How far away are you guys from allowing users to manipulate/alter the motionbox player?

JG: It’s something a number of users have asked for, especially many of the more “pro” oriented small businesses and hobbyists using Motionbox. We’re looking at a number of options here, including player color customization, and more control over the end screen, etc. We hope to have a solution later this year.

DI: What aspect of the site are you most proud of?

JG: There are a lot of different aspects of the site that are particularly noteworthy, including our very easy-to-use filmstrip mixing functionality, our large format HD player, and our various download formats. However, one of our most interesting recent developments has nothing to do with the “site” itself, but is rather a separate express uploader application running on Adobe Air. (www.motionbox.com/install/mxu) What’s so cool about this app is that it allows users to queue many videos to be uploaded in the background without any need to monitor their progress or worry about changes to computer states. For example, if the connection to the Internet breaks, your upload picks up from where it left off and you don’t have to start uploading all over again, which can be a particularly annoying issue when one is uploading large HD files. This “little” application enables us to overcome most of the effect of relatively slow ISP upload speeds.

DI: How many premium account holders do you have? How many free accounts?

JG: We don’t release financial-related information on the company. However, I can say that we have over 1.5 million registered users and that this represents 6x growth over the past 6 months.

DI: What happens if someone doesn’t re-up for a second or third year subscription? Do they have a way of getting their data off your server?

JG: Yes. One of the reasons we hold on to the source file for our premium users is precisely so that the user will be able to re-download that file at a later date should they decide to move their videos elsewhere. Obviously, we’d prefer that they stay with Motionbox, but we believe that if we can’t continue to offer them a valuable enough business proposition then we shouldn’t be in a position to hold their videos hostage. This is one of the factors that ensures we’ll continue to innovate and offer added value to our current users over the years to come.

DI: What’s up next for you guys?

JG: We will be announcing some very important developments in the coming months, both from a partnership and a product development standpoint. While I can’t say much about either right now, I will say that in re: the latter, there is an extremely robust technology engine riding underneath the current Motionbox platform which has yet to be fully “turned on” as it were. Once we enable some of the application hooks into this engine, you’ll begin to see some very exciting and novel video-enabled products emerge.

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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?

Charles—As the aforementioned history buffs, we knew a lot about wars. And WWI was especially intriguing—it should never have happened, for one thing, and for another, as Tom Brokaw and Peter Jennings point out in their respective works on the Twentieth Century, WW1 was pivotal—the aftermath of it and of the Treaty of Versailles is still with us today. Just look at the Middle East—WWII—Africa—the Cold War. But even though we knew many of the facts about the war itself, researching the personal aspects is a never ending task. First person accounts, anything written during the war, letters, newspapers, diaries, talking to families who had relatives in the war, all had to be researched from a different perspective.

Caroline—So many men who come home from war—and it doesn’t matter which war—are silent about what they saw and did and suffered. Yet oddly enough, the men who do talk about their experiences seem to share many things. As one said, the fighting tools may be different, but the fear of dying, and the killing are the same. And this we must get right. Easy to know certain dates, harder to understand what a man felt when he was going over the top on an attack from which he probably would never come back. That’s often learned by reading between the lines.

DI: I’m no expert, but you seem to have a command of the vernacular of the time and location, yet it still speaks to our present ears. How do you manage that sleight-of-hand?

Charles—It isn’t sleight of hand so much as it is listening and understanding why there are differences in speech and outlook and way of life. Then you have to distill it so that it comes out naturally, not as a lesson interjected into the story.

Caroline—That’s why we travel to England, spend time in the locale we are interested in using (and sometimes that changes when we arrive in Village A to find it not at all what we expected—and then around the corner is Village B, with wonderful opportunities). There’s so much to explore, so much to resurrect from the changes made since 1919, so much to understand about what makes the people in B far more interesting to a writer than those in A.

DI: Part of the new novel, A Matter of Justice, is set in the year 1900, in South Africa. How many times have you been to England to research the environs? And what about South Africa now? Did the novel require a trip?

Charles—Caroline had been to South Africa, and when she came home she told me that one day we might fit what she’d learned and experienced into one of the Rutledge books. This happened to be the right one. But we both get to England as many times as possible. You can’t let your feeling for time and place go stale.

Caroline—I didn’t have the time constraints that Charles, still gainfully employed, had to work with. Most of his free time went to convention travel and promotional tours. So I had the opportunity to travel more. And some of it rubs off. The South East Asian collection in the little museum in SEARCH THE DARK, the stone from Egypt that provided the title for WATCHERS OF TIME, the collection of birds from Central America in A PALE HORSE, and here in A MATTER OF JUSTICE, the Boer War. The British were great travelers and explorers, so what we add from our own experiences fits the period. I have lost count of the number of slides and CD’s Charles has watched, to catch up with me on the feel of a place or event.

DI: When most authors write, like me, for instance, we do so in solitude. What’s it like collaborating? What’s your writing process like? Do you work together in one room? Online?

Charles—Of necessity, we began writing from a distance. And we got used to that. You still create on your own, making suggestions about how you view a scene or a character or a situation. Then we e-mail or instant message the passage to the other. Since we don’t outline, and instead look into the characters and setting to give us direction, we must listen to each other and to the characters in order to go forward. What collaboration gives is a sounding board that helps define what goes into the final manuscript. And even when we disagree, what is best for Rutledge and the book is the ultimate decision. My words, Caroline’s words, it doesn’t matter.

Caroline—We begin each book with a concept. And we strive to make the opening pages capture what we want to say, even though we don’t know what comes next or who did it or why. And once that’s done, we build on it. We can’t work together in the same room—we got so accustomed to writing in different places that even if we are in the same house, we work in different rooms and mostly different floors. We didn’t really understand collaboration when we started the series, so we developed our own system. So far—so good!

DI: Do you divvy up the work, say one person handles narrative while another dialogue or do you both get your hands dirty with both?

Charles—Hands dirty! And that way we both understand where we are heading and why. The narrative and the dialogue and the descriptive bits have to blend seamlessly.

Caroline—That’s one of our goals, to make it seem like one person. Otherwise the reader is distracted trying to assess which of us is speaking. And—this way we have fewer revisions overall, because of the care taken with each scene.

DI: There’s a tradition in the mystery and crime genres of authors using pen names. Why did you guys do it?

Charles—it isn’t really a pen name as such. It comes from my mother’s side of the family, sort of a salute to them. My father’s name (German/Norwegian) is not as easily remembered, and that’s death for fans looking to find you.

Caroline—I’m truly Caroline, so it doesn’t worry me. People ask though why only Charles is on the jacket. If you look at the space available for an author’s name, Charles and Caroline Todd would have to be so small it would be hard to pick out on a shelf. And since Caroline and Charles have the same Latin root, it doesn’t really matter. Besides, I sign Charles Todd, never Caroline.

DI: Your novels all take place in the same year or so. Is this on purpose? Can we expect that the 24th mystery, should there be one, will still be set in and around 1920, or?

Charles—We began the series in June of 1919—when Rutledge left the clinic where he was being treated for shell shock—and have moved along about a month each novel. The reason is two-fold. We’d be up to WWII before long, at the rate of each novel moving ahead a year. And most importantly, watching how Rutledge heals—or doesn’t progress—is part of his story. If you jumped ahead each year, it would be lip service to that. And the war is a character, in a way, and we want to capture the changes that it brought in its wake.

Caroline—I think the next Rutledge, THE RED DOOR, begins in June of 1920, a year after Rutledge left the Clinic, and is the 12th book in the series. Fans seem to understand that and they want to know about him as a man, not just a new crime to solve. Some mysteries work best leaping a year, others seem to be more solid if the pace is slower. We decided in the beginning to go more slowly, and we haven’t regretted it so far. Besides—the Depression is depressing. We’re just coming into the Twenties. And they will bring new directions.

DI: Who are some of your influences? What other writers do you like?

Charles—Caroline read to us when we were children. Poe and Robert Louis Stevenson, Conan-Doyle and poetry and whatever else she thought we’d like. And I think that was a tremendous influence for me. I was the child who loved words, so it was a short step from that to reading voraciously on my own.

Caroline—Another influence is the southern tradition of sitting on the porch in the cool of a summer’s evening and talk about any and everything. I grew up listening from the shadows, and of course my father read to us in the winter. So the story-telling concept put down early roots. I loved reading as a result, and passed that on to both my son and my daughter. Even my husband liked to sit in on the story-telling hour just before bedtime.

CT—As for other writers—we’ve been reading Val McDermid’s latest, also Lee Child, Nelson DeMille, Julia Spencer-Fleming—mostly what we like best is mystery/suspense and psychological suspense. Which is why we write what we like. There’s Judy Clemens, Robin Hathaway, people we happen to know, and sometimes we go back to Frederick Forsyth and Jack Higgins, or read Reed Coleman Farrell and Michael Connelly, James Lee Burke, Linda Fairstein, P. D. James, Peter Lovesey—oh, and Stuart Kaminsky has a new one out that’s on our list.

DI: What about outside the genre? Who else do you read?

Charles: I’m interested in Constitutional Law, the Civil War, World War II, economics. And so I read in those categories when I have time. Sadly writers, who love reading, find their time is circumscribed. But in my library, you’ll find a wide range of interests.

Caroline—In mine as well. I like traveling, and so the travels of other people interest me. I enjoy Elizabethan English history. Stuart history. American Revolutionary War history. The Johnstown Flood. I currently need a new floor for my collection of books. Archeology is a favorite field—I once wanted to be an archeologist. Cold War history. The list goes on. We’ve discovered that the more widely you read, the more breadth you bring to your writing.

DI: You turn out about a book a year. What’s the hardest part about maintaining the series?

Charles—I don’t think we’ve found a hard part. The books seem to flow. What’s confusing is January. This year for instance. We’re talking about the latest, A MATTER OF JUSTICE just out in hard cover, and of course last year’s hard cover, A PALE HORSE, which this January came out in trade paperback. And we’re finishing the next Rutledge per our deadline—this year, it’s THE RED DOOR—and beginning to have inklings about the proposal for the next book. I can remember someone asking me a question about a certain character—and my mind went blank. It took several seconds to remember WHICH book she came from!

Caroline—The hard part is leaving the book when we write THE END. We are fond of certain characters, interested in their futures, and just getting to know their pasts—and we must walk away. A scant few appear again, people like Rutledge’s sister and Hamish and the poet O.A. Manning, but for the most part, it’s like moving away and leaving behind friends.

DI: I’m sure we have some aspiring novelists out there. What advice would you give those just putting the finishing touches on their first drafts?

Charles—My advice is to look at your draft objectively. That’s hard to do, but if you are honest, you’ll find places that could be better written or realized, or that are overblown where you got carried away. That’s a sure sign of a first novel. And look at the subtext, because a lot of beginning writers forget that or skip over it. Subtext is the little detail or touch that makes a book interesting and draws in the reader. I just read a manuscript where all the men are handsome and all the women are beautiful beyond words. I couldn’t keep them apart because they had no individuality. Get to know your characters and make them real.

Caroline—Three suggestions: 1) Writing is a craft. Learn the rules that can make you successful. 2) Read a lot of books in the style you’re interested in—look at how they get people in and out of a room, how they build suspense, how the plotting furthers the plot, and why you like or dislike the characters. Not to copy, but to understand. 3) And learn how to make a submission manuscript look professional. That’s essential if you want an agent to consider your work.

DI: What else is on your mind today?

Charles—Readers may be interested in knowing that we’ve also been writing short stories most of which feature Rutledge and bring in Hamish, still alive at that stage. You get to know more about him and also see Rutledge in a war setting but still a man who is a trained policeman. THE STRAND MAGAZINE carries most of them.

Caroline—The last time we were in Kent, we were exploring places we’d visited before, and we noticed a story was taking shape! Not about Rutledge, the professional, certainly. Enter Bess Crawford—and she wouldn’t be put off!—who debuts on August 25th in A DUTY TO THE DEAD. This series will run concurrently with Rutledge, summer for Bess, winter for him. Her father is a retired colonel. The family has served King and Country for generations, and Bess herself was brought up in India rather than sent home to be schooled. Her life is quite different from most young Englishwomen of good background—she knows something about weapons, different cultures, and human nature. She’s also more independent. And she’s been exciting to get to know. In DUTY, set in England in 1916, she finds herself facing a moral obligation which puts her judgment at risk and tests her mettle as her father’s daughter.

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