Author: Emma Loggins
Date: 2007-09-17

Interview:
We had the honor of sitting down with Alex Boylan to discuss his latest project Around The World For Free. Here's what he had to say:

Can you tell me a little bit about the Around The World For Free project is going to work?

It's a daily online interactive show. So, on the 18th I leave live on the Early Show, and I set off trying to circum navigate the globe. What happens is every day we will wake up and video update. It'll be the first thing we do in the morning, and at that point and time it's more of this is what has happened in the past twenty-four hours, this is where we are trying to get to, this is where we give a shout out to the audience who have helped out, and just my update to the audience. Once a week there will be a recap show as well on the site.

Now if you go to site that's where people can write there own profile just like MySpace or any of these social networking sites. You can send me a message that I can get any where on the globe and say hey Alex, you know, you're in Peru and my grandfather lives right down there and if you work in a coffee plantation for a day, you can get a free place to stay and to show you the town or what have you. So that's where that interaction will take place.


What attracted you to this project originally?

You know, it's, it's this project was originally an evolution. It started, I'd say probably like two years ago, it was a conversation that I was having with a friend. I was actually living in Florida, and someone said, "Oh it's easy for you to travel. You won this major race and you won some money."

It never dawned on me, I have been blessed my whole life to travel. Way before the race I used to travel a lot more before I ever got into entertainment, and so I remember saying right there, I could start off with no money and make it around the world and that's where it was like, I remember saying, that would make a really great idea for a show.

Blah, blah, blah, two, year, a year or so goes on, I am working on a surf documentary going on and documenting these, these travel shows. We were working a show in, El Salvador, and what we would do when we were done shooting for the day. When the crew was resting, we would take just one camera and we would go off and shoot these little segments. See we were just doing it for fun and we were looking at the footage at the end, and it was some of the best footage we'd get, because it just, when you don't have such a large crew around you, we could just get access into these peoples' homes in the barrios in El Salvador.

It was, it was really riveting and we were just like wow, and that came up again, we started talking about it, he's like, you know, let's do it. Right around that time I was in L.A., and Burt Roberts was getting done, one of the producers on the show, was finishing up a show on Fox and we were finishing up our documentary we where doing and we all started talking. At that point and time MySpace was becoming big and all the social networking sites, and we put two and two together. Instead of this just being a big show or documentary perhaps, it will, we turned into hey what if this were an interactive show with the audience involved. There was a hook, and I just decided to go. I said hey let's do it.