The best part of producing a daily show is knowing that many listeners come to consider you a regular companion. The worst part is hardly having a minute between one deadline and the next and doing everything in a hurry.

“Being a celebrity can cause an accidental cheapening of the things one holds dear,” Steve Martin once wrote in The New York Times. “A slip of the tongue in an interview and it’s easy for me to feel I’ve sold out some private part of my life in exchange for publicity.”

But they bear little resemblance to the conversations we have in daily life. Unlike an actual conversation, which requires only two people, a Fresh Air interview is a team effort. One of my producers finds and books the guest, a researcher locates the material I need to look at for background, an associate editor cuts the tape, and the executive pr

The interviews presented here were conducted on the run and are by no means “definitive.” But I hope you’ll accept them in the spirit in which they’re offered, as entertaining and thought-provoking conversations with people I believe are worthy of your time.

This experience and others like it have taught me that when an interviewee clams up, it’s sometimes out of fear that the journalist he’s speaking with won’t fully comprehend what he’s saying or simply won’t care. This was an important lesson: It’s one of the reasons I try to be well prepared for each interview, on the assumption that a guest is mor

It’s my job to help these people, the experts as well as the artists, focus and present their thoughts.

I try in my interviews to find the connections between my guests’ lives and their work (the reason we care about them in the first place). I’d love to know how Chris Rock got to be so funny, how Dennis Hopper developed his screen presence, how John Updike became a great writer.

But he did say that he thought the accident had led him to become an actor. In his roles, he could express “frustrations, and sometimes angers, that are simply inappropriate in everyday life.”

OF COURSE MY LISTENERS ARE INVISIBLE, too—at least to me. I’m always amazed by the diversity of the show’s listeners and the settings they listen in.