Seattlest Interview: John Moe

How did you come up with The Works, your show about local business and technology?

The station wanted to have a show about business and tech and they wanted me to do a show so we just put those elements together. I thought of the name as something that wasn’t a pun and that also called to mind both variety (like a pizza with the works) and the concept of machinery and industry for both the business and tech angle.

The tech side I wasn’t worried about since I had been at Amazon but the business section has always been the part of the paper I discarded first. But after a while I realized that businesses stories are just people stories. People who get an idea to open an ice cream shop or make hats or try to make a rocket to space or whatever. It’s just people’s lives plus an investment of capital.

What elements do you look for in deciding on stories or subjects for The Works?

I actually had to re-think this when Sara Lerner at our station started helping out as a producer and wanted to know what to book. I settled on the idea of the businesses being either unique or iconic. So a gift shop is not something I would do but the all-goth Gargoyles gift shop in the U-district is a natural. And XXX Root Beer in Issaquah is an icon so I went there. For tech, I try to do stories that make sense to everyone, not just tech folk. I want my mother to understand all the tech stories so even if I’m doing something complex like network neutrality, I try to explain it at the same time as I explore it. So it’s in depth as much as possible but also accessible. I met a tech guy at a party a while back who said that my show was a link between technology and the average person and I was really delighted to hear that.

Are there stories you've wanted to do for the show, but, for whatever reason, have not been able to?

I wanted to do something about the Gates Foundation a while back but we never were able to work it out. Now it appears they’re going to be pretty busy. But I’ll still try. And we’ve been wanting to do something on the Lusty Lady but they don’t appear to be interested in talking to us. I also tried to do a phone interview on these new $100 hand cranked laptops they’re making but they just didn’t have time to talk to me about it. Which is fine, they’re trying to change the world and they were really nice about it but they’re just too busy.

What Works stories would you include in a "best of" collection?

I really liked the XXX Root Beer story because it was this family all running this place together with so much energy and enthusiasm. And they didn’t appear to have heard of KUOW so there was no preconceived notion on their part of what public radio was. I also loved the interview with the guy from Husky Deli in West Seattle, who has been running the place since he was 19 and he’s, like, 48 now. The Tim’s Cascade Chips tour was pretty cool too. I’m getting hungry. I try to do at least one interview a week where I get out of the studio and take people on an audio field trip.

Lately I’ve been thinking that I should just do a show every week on different foods getting made because it has everything you want in radio: location, cool sounds, a step by step process, machinery, someone to interview who’s an expert, an easily described end product. With something like Mighty O Donuts, who I profiled a while back, it’s just a natural radio story: “how a vegan donut gets made”.

You also regularly (though not exclusively) host a KUOW call-in show, Power of Voice. How do you pick topics and guests for that?

The way I’ve been doing it is pretty simple. I try to pick a topic of six words or less and something that everyone in the world would have an answer for. So we do like “High School Reunions: Attend or Avoid”. We always get a lot of calls. I try to make those shows as simple and efficient as I possibly can.

What types of calls or comments can absolutely kill a show?

The only thing that I think can really bring down a topic is someone calling in to say it’s a bad topic. Because I think that can make everyone just feel bad, especially other callers who are really invested in it and really interested. Most of the call-ins I do aren’t on really weighty topics, they’re more like party conversation, so I try to say on air that I realize it’s not the heaviest subject in the world but it’s interesting and fun anyway. That usually takes care of it.

What's the worst topic for a show you ever picked?

I’m not sure it was the worst but it was the bleakest: we did a show with the topic “The Worst Mistake You Ever Made” and, not surprisingly, got a torrent of regret and pain pouring through the phone lines. Interesting stuff but I just wanted to crawl into a hole after that one. I’ve produced a few topics or segments or shows that went nowhere but I’m not going to list those because we have searchable archives.

Do you ever wish Eric Liu would step aside and give you absolute Power of Voice?

Eric hasn’t been on in a while, unfortunately. Lately I’ve been alternating with Jeannie Yandel who also produces The Conversation. I like having different voices in that time slot. I think it’s interesting when it’s not the same host week after week.

What are your favorite radio moments that you've been responsible for, or at least involved in?

When I filled in for Bill on Rewind, I got to interview Richard Simmons as well as Lou Pearlman who invented the Backstreet Boys. Those were both really fun. And I interviewed Jared from the Subway commercials. I guess I love the interviews that you wouldn’t normally associate with public radio. And recently I did a story for Weekend America, a national show out of LA, about the break up of the Seattle band Gas Huffer. I went to college with Matt Wright, the lead singer, and got some good interview tape of their final show and one of their last rehearsals. It managed to be kind of funny but also way more emotionally moving than I expected.

Oh! And David Sedaris. I interviewed him and he was one of the nicest people I ever met. Actually, I’m always thrilled when I get to meet people I’ve always admired. I’ve interviewed Robyn Hitchcock, Jonathan Richman, Jeff Tweedy, Mark Mothersbaugh, and too many more to mention. I try not to creep them out with fandom, at least until after the interview.

At least one member of Seattlest considers your pop song correspondences "some of the funniest shit ever." How'd you hook up with McSweeney's?

I just submitted a list many years ago. Went in through the email queue like everyone else. They printed it. I did some more. Repeat repeat repeat. After a while, I noticed that most of my submissions had turned into letters about pop songs so we just put them in a column. Some of my stuff was in the McSweeney’s anthology Created in Darkness by Troubled Americans which led to some readings with Dave Eggers and others here and in Portland. I have some other pieces, including some that have never been on McSweeneys.net, in the new McSweeney’s book Mountain Man Dance Moves coming out in September. So all I really know about McSweeney’s is it’s this place where I email stuff and then it shows up in other places and then I see Dave once in a while. But I’m thrilled to be a part of it in whatever way I can be. I remember when someone showed me the site for the first time and I just thought “this is like what I write only funnier!”

We hear tell you're writing a book. And we hear it's going well. Can you tell us more about it?

NO! I mean, yes.

It’s called Conservatize Me: How I Tried to Become a Righty with the Help of Richard Nixon, Sean Hannity, Toby Keith, and Beef Jerky. I took a month off last summer and tried to become a conservative. Like a real stereotyped party-line conservative. I met with William Kristol, Rich Lowry, Jonah Goldberg, and Jeff Gannon and asked them to convert me. I spent 4th of July in rural Idaho, made pilgrimages to the Reagan and Nixon museums, saw a Toby Keith concert in Indiana, did Toby Keith karaoke at the Little Red Hen, shot guns, drove Escalades, ate a lot of jerky, went a little crazy, and sat in with Michael Medved for a day. As I’ve gotten older, I wondered how much of one’s politics is determined by where one lives and I’ve lived in one of the most liberal cities in the country for almost my whole life. I was raised by liberals in a liberal city but in recent years I’ve started to just question everything and found that I didn’t really fit any labels any more. So I tried to rewire myself. There’s plenty of funny stuff in it and, I hope, interesting stuff too. Essentially, it’s a testament to the power of just shutting up and listening to people instead of arguing all the time. It’s amazing how much your ears can hear when you shut your mouth. And it turns out that beef jerky is, like, completely awesome.

The book is even available for pre-order!

You write about your kids on Monkey Disaster, and probably mention them elsewhere that I haven't been able to Google. How have your kids influenced your many and varied public careers?

A big part of having kids or hanging around kids is answering their questions. My kids always have a ton of questions about everything, especially Star Wars, superheroes, and dinosaurs. And just sitting there answering those questions makes you re-examine the world you’re living in a lot more, which you need for radio or writing or whatever creative thing you’re involved in. Just try looking at a pop machine and figuring out how it works. As an adult, you don’t think about it, you just put money in, get the pop, drink it, discard the container. But a kid wants to know the mechanism of it, where the money goes, how the refrigeration works, why that thumping sound happens, then what the container looks like. It’s a lot more interesting way to go through life. I could do a radio segment on how a pop machine works and that wouldn’t occur to me if I wasn’t around kids.

And my son actually factors into the book pretty heavily. He ended up joining the Sierra Club just before I got started on the research. We got a mailing about ANWR and he wanted to know what it was all about. We explained to him that President Bush and his friends want to look for oil up there but other people are scared that it will hurt the animals and they want us to send them money to help them stop anyone from looking for oil. He went to his piggy bank, got out the only eleven dollars he had to his name, and solemnly said “Send them this. I want to save the animals.” They sent him a tote bag and a membership card and everything. He was 4. So all through the book while I try to go hard line righty, he’s like a little Greek chorus constantly chastising me.

Which Seattle blogs do you read regularly? (Ahem.)

Why, Seattlest of course! And Defective Yeti by the brilliant Matthew Baldwin. And USS Mariner for my desperate hopes.