 I wrote The Ethicist for 12 years for the New York Times magazine. A job that ended about 16 months ago. I'm out of the ethics business now. You can kill a guy for all I care really professionally. In the ensuing year, I have been working on a radio show for Public Radio. And it's taught me some interesting lessons about structure that I think apply beyond the luxurious confines of Public Radio. Our show is a one-on-one interview show. One host, one guest, one conversation. Now, that's a staple of radio and television ever since there's been radio and television. Well, and earlier, I guess you can see the dialogues of Plato as kind of an ancient chat show. It's Socrates and Glaucongo head-to-head tonight on NBC. Our show reinvents the one-on-one interview around this premise that people are particularly interesting when speaking not directly about themselves but about something they care about passionately. And we give them a structure within which they can do that. The name of the show is Person Place Thing. And each guest comes prepared to speak about one of each. One person, one place, one thing. They can love it, they can hate it as long as they have passionate feelings about it. Now, it's easy to fall in love with our own ideas. And when you put them to the test, it can sometimes be a little disillusioning. But in this case, I say with no modesty whatsoever, this structure is brilliant in this sense that it got particularly gifted speakers to tell stories they never had before. Let me give you some examples. Our very first guest, Dan Savage, the sex columnist. Dan chose as his person Caroline Matilda, the teenage daughter of George III of England, who at 15 is married off to her cousin, a guy she'd never met before who's the king of Denmark. She's sent to Copenhagen where she establishes a kind of enlightenment court. She introduces all sorts of progressive ideas. She's dead at 23. It's a fantastic story, but it's not what I thought of as a Dan Savage story. Where's the sex? Well, all right, he did get to refer to Henry VIII as a horn dog, but still, it's not Savage enough. I asked Dan why he chose this, and he said that he'd rather speak about the tutors than anything, but no one ever asked him. Ed Koch did the show. He was 88 at the time, former mayor of New York. And like many people, as he's gotten older, he's gotten a bit prickly, a bit combative, and he scared the hell out of me. I was very apprehensive about having him on the show. He chose as his place his burial plot in Trinity Cemetery. This is an odd choice, especially for a man who identifies so strongly with the Jewish community in New York. Why Trinity Cemetery? Well, it's because it's the only active cemetery in Manhattan. A term of art I learned means it's the only cemetery in Manhattan that will put a body in the ground. Mayor Koch said he's not leaving, even when it's ever. Well, it gave him an opportunity by talking about the physical design of this place to discuss his own mortality with a kind of modesty and a kind of directness and a kind of courage that was genuinely moving. Do you know David Rakoff? He did the show. He's done a lot of this American life. A wonderful writer, a wonderful performer. He's grappling with some serious medical problems now that have resulted in his all but losing the use of his left arm. It's a very difficult thing to speak of. It's very intimate, and there's a risk, I think, of getting either too sentimental on the one hand or too cavalier on the other. David's thing was a one-handed can opener, and he brought this along to what was our first live show. And to use it, to demonstrate it, he brought a giant can of cookies. He sets it on the table. He takes the one-handed can opener, slaps it on the can, hits a switch. 150 people in this room are wrapped as they watch a can opener, making one orbit of this can. And when it completes the orbit and the lid pops up, they applaud for a can opener. David takes the cookies, hands it to the people in the front row. Sorry, no cookies. I'm sorry. They pass them around, and with that kind of good spirit, that kind of lack of self-consciousness, he's now able to talk about a very intimate medical problem without self-consciousness, without self-dramatizing. It was fantastic, and it worked again and again and again for Ricky Lee Jones and Samantha B and Jane Smiley. And the lesson I took away is it's not important to ask harder questions or oblique questions. What was it? The thing that made it work was giving these people a structure which in which they would now think differently. They've spoken forever. They have set pieces. To get them out of that, give them a new structure. They'll speak brilliantly. And I think it works, not just in radio. Thanks very much. Thank you.