My afternoon with lonelysandwich.

When I was at SXSW this year, I decided I’d take the time to work on a project about creative failures. I asked a number of prominent Internet names if they’d share a little bit about their creative failures on camera.

That project in itself was a creative failure, at least as it was originally envisioned. What came out of it though was something far better.

The only person who actually made time to sit with me was Adam Lisagor. You may know him as lonelysandwich on Twitter1 or the wildly popular podcast You Look Nice Today. You might even possibly know him as co-creator of the iPhone app Birdhouse.

The original plan was to sit down and do 5 minutes on a creative failure that came to his mind. In the end we sat down for over 30 minutes and talked about a wide variety of issues revolving around being a creative person and what it means to temper impulse and energy to increase your chances of creative success.

All that is a bunch of fancy lad talk to say that Adam says he’s lazy and makes sure something he’ll make is good before he gets his ass off the couch2.

I’ll also tell you what else Sandy is: He’s a real mensch.

I had purchased my Panasonic GH1 a week or so before going to SXSW and hadn’t done too much with it. I certainly hadn’t done an episode of the COCKTAIL NAPKIN on it yet, so I hadn’t yet discovered that the microphone jack was a non-standard size3.

Of course, I made this discovery an hour before I was supposed to meet Adam for the shoot. Not having a car in Austin, I couldn’t easily go to Radio Shack for an adapter before heading to the convention center. I had no choice but to record him using sound on camera.

When I met him and explained what was going to happen, he said that he had wireless mics, an external audio recorder and a tripod back at the hotel that I was welcome to use. So we walked back to his hotel, he went and got his gear and the production quality is much better thanks to his generosity.

This is the first in what will eventually become a series of discussions with people you may know from the Internet. I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed making it.