via Maya Hsu

My former colleague, Richard Hsu, is at it again. You may remember Richard, and his talented daughter, Maya, from my posts about his One Page Blog, and HsuTube blogs, and the really interesting videos he and Maya produced. I talked with Richard this week and caught up on what he’s up to these days. His new site, Hsu Untied, is Richard’s dive into the audio medium where he records podcasts of lawyers and special guests about their hobbies outside of their daily legal grind. Although Maya is now almost 16 and no longer interested in helping her Dad make topics like “Assignment in a Change Control” actually interesting, she did produce the artwork for the logo on the new site.

Hsu Untied gives Richard a chance to sit down and talk with interesting people about their interesting hobbies. In some cases, the hobbies are now their full-time jobs. When I was talking to Richard, I could really hear the enthusiasm in his voice of how much he enjoyed this new endeavor. For those of us that blog, or podcast, or other types of social media productions, we don’t do it for the fame, or the money, or the business it drives to our ‘real jobs,’ we do it because it is a lot of fun.

For Richard, he told me that he has always wanted “to be an interviewer like Charlie Rose or a Terry Gross” and this allows him to do so, as he calls it, “on a micro scale.” Currently he has around 36 podcasts up and running on his site, but has almost twice that many recorded and ready for production. Because he’s interviewing based on outside interests, there’s no rush for the recordings to go out, so he compiling and releasing them over time.

When he started out, Richard thought he’d be lucky to interview a handful of people. As of this week, however, he is approaching his 100th interview, and it doesn’t look like he’s slowing down. In fact, while talking with him, I immediately thought of a good friend of mine that he should interview, and I have since connected them for a future interview. Richard also mentioned that he gets a few attorneys to contact him directly for interviews, but that his librarian in his office keeps him informed of potential interviewees. Once again, what would lawyers do without a good librarian to keep them up to speed??

So far, Richard has covered a wide range of hobbies including skydiving, mountain climbing, oil painting, magic, astronomy, opera singing, winemaking, boxing, chess and ballet and others. In addition, he has interviewed some Special Guests who left the legal profession to become things like a best-selling author, Editor of the NYTimes Crossword Puzzles, the drummer for Train, and a Professional Poker Player. That’s a pretty good list of very interesting people, and there are so many more lined up in the future.

I asked Richard how long he thought he would keep doing these interviews, and he said that he plans to keep doing it as long as he’s having fun. Well… let’s hope he continues to have fun for a long time.