Don

Have you been on Coin Chat Radio yet? No, I don’t mean listening to it, though I would encourage you to go to www.coinchatradio.com and do so. What I mean is have you been a guest on the program yet?

Still no?

Well, I’m looking for you. It is amazing how many interviews I have done since the weekly program was launched in the middle of March. The number on my pocket recording device has passed 50 and that doesn’t count the interviews I have done from our podcast studio here in Iola.

At the American Numismatic Association convention I did 15 interviews. All were essentially done on the spot with little notice. The U.S. Mint was particularly wonderful. At the debut of the ultra-high-relief gold coin on July 30, I requested a little time with the Mint director for the radio program. I expected to be squeezed in at some point and the interview would have run at some conveniently scheduled time. But when they heard that I could still get them on the July 31 program if I could talk to the director quickly, I found myself talking to Ed Moy himself in hardly more than 10 minutes after my request.

Wow, that was fun. We did the interview. I learned a lot and I immediately got out the laptop and sent the file off to Iola. The staff here was able to put it into the July 31 program. That’s what I call not just a success, but great fun.

I roamed the show with my handy recorder and by the end of the convention, I had done 15 interviews of the best and brightest of the numismatic hobby.

I think the guests had almost as much fun as I did with our radio conversations. I’m not looking for 15-second sound bites to try to butcher somebody with. I do interviews that range from 5 minutes to 20 minutes. Most tend to fall in the 6-8 minute range.

The point of the interviews is to fully develop the topic at hand. It lets the person being interviewed fully develop his thoughts and it lets me come up with the occasional pertinent question.

Some individuals do not want to be interviewed, but I have found that that is rare. At the ANA convention nobody I asked to speak with turned me down.

For radio purposes, I wished the convention could have gone on and on. Just about everybody you want to talk to is there. The challenge, of course, is to find the right time and the right subject matter. But I find there are always a lot of things going on, so I am never at a loss for a topic.

Aside from the one refusal that I have had in five months, I have had one or two, “Send me a list of questions you are going to ask me.” Well, I didn’t send the list and interviews with those individuals never happened.

So, if you see me coming, remember I might just have that recorder in my pocket and I might just have you picked out as the next weekly radio star. Don’t try to run away. It will be more fun to stick around and do the interview.

In the meantime, check out Coin Chat Radio this week and listen to the archived programs, too. It’s a who’s who of numismatics out there just for you.