March 4, 2019
I'm trying out a new idea in "Something New" and I'd love to hear what you think. Despite the intersection with a bit of my formative adolescence, I promise not to take anything personally. Post in the comments, send me a message to aaronpyost@gmail.com, or find me on Twitter @Yosterstrudel and hop in my mentions. (Is that a thing anyone with any amount of followers can say?!) Thanks so much for taking the time to read this newsletter/blog, however often you get to it!
SOMETHING NEW
SOMETHING NEW
During a stretch of my childhood growing up in Northern Arizona, I revelled in my nightly routine of slowly easing myself into sleep. After snuggling into bed I’d read my CSI page-a-day calendar, flip through a couple pages of whatever magazine had been delivered to my mailbox most recently, maybe read a chapter or two of a book, and then, finally, after extinguishing my reading light, I would power on my cassette player/radio. Sometimes I would go to the old standby pop stations broadcasting from towers an hour or two away, in hopes of hearing some tune that was basically only accessible to me via chancing upon it at the right moment. But what most intrigued me was switching to the AM dial and seeing what I could pick up. There were multiple alien-based late-night call-in shows, a crackly feed of old-timey radio dramas, and a mix of barely coherent music stations playing songs from decades I’d only ever conceptually understood as having existed.
The sound that sparked the most comfort was, somehow, found in the airwaves of San Francisco based KNBR as the steady tone of Jon Miller called play-by-play for Giants games. As division rivals to my beloved Diamondbacks, I enjoyed silently rooting against the bay area team as they closed out games on the coast. It wasn’t always a clear signal, and sometimes it didn’t convey at all, but when it did I always kept the volume turned way down since I wasn’t listening with headphones and since my parents and sister slept in the adjacent rooms. My love of baseball has waxed and waned in the last couple decades, but the sensation of reaching into the darkness and connecting with the sound of a stranger’s voice a world away is a feeling that probably birthed a love of podcasting that’s going strong in its 15th year.
My near obsession with blowing through the episode list on my iPod then Kindle then phone has exposed me to more diverse voices than the average listener. Even so, I acknowledge I’m barely able to scratch the surface. Even if I devoted all my free time to listening, even with cranking up the speed to 4x, even with fast forwarding through the ads, my own biases would likely take me into the realm of the slickly produced and tightly written shows. How do I inject that healthy dose of randomness in my listening diet? I could turn on the radio again, I suppose, if I could find one, but that would still bump up against the walls of geographically prohibitive radio signals. (While my reach from northeastern Arizona all the way to San Francisco did span an impressive distance - upwards of 700 miles if you go as the crow - my current digs in the flat, semi-urban Midwest do not seem nearly as conducive) Well friends, I’m trying something here that just might get me the 2019 version of that feeling I felt back in the early 2000s. I call it the Pod Piper Radio Scramble, or PPRS in the spirit of 4-letter radio call signs.
Podcast Addict, my trusty podcatcher of choice, allows users to subscribe to a feed based on a word or phrase - something I believe you can do on Instagram if that’s a helpful reference. For the inaugural round of PPRS, I selected a single word and downed as many episodes as I could while still keeping up with my regular devotion to seeking out things I more readily expect to be awesome (a bloggers gotta blog, amirite?). Here are, in order of least to most recently heard, all the podcast episodes filtered my way via the word “attention.”
More Attention, Less Deficit - "To Tell or Not to Tell?"
If you have ADD, revealing this bit about you to your employer is a difficult decision. This short installment could be broadly transposed onto any private matter and the extent to which it intersects with one’s workplace.
Morning Coffee - "Time and attention"
This is something like a entrepreneurial pep talk. Kind of vague but short enough...and bookended by very large chunks of two different songs. A good listen to start the day if you’re not a morning person and maybe don’t really want your podcasts to tell essential or heart-wrenching stories.
Genius Network - "Media Master Class Part 1: How To Skyrocket Your Media Attention, Viewership and Audience with Paula Rizzo and Joe Polish"
Very markety; how to present yourself when angling for a television interview. A bit intriguing for it’s novelty, but highly irrelevant to my life.
Power of Families - "Paying Attention"
This is the podcast I’m least likely to have sought out intentionally, but it turned out to have some sage advice. Basically if you don’t listen to your kids tell you about the little things, they won’t tell you about the big things. Also, props for citing the Mary Oliver attention poem “Sometimes.” (“Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.”)
Stoic Meditations - "Pay attention to the past in order to tackle the future"
Short. Fine.
Beat your Genes - "Keeping attention in class, When Authority is altruistic, autism, war"
What an odd thing Beat Your Genes is - an evolutionary psychology call-in show podcast. This episode had a conspiratorial vibe to it, and was the closest thing to that strange alien/witchcraft/governmental-overreach AM radio world I found in this batch.
Tech Tonic - "James Williams on the attention economy"
This was great, and something I’d readily recommend: a former Google employee turns to philosophy to understand how the tech industry is distracting us from living our best lives.
Let’s Know Things - "Attention"
Host Colin Wright has a hint of Roman Mars and Dan Carlin in his voice, trending more toward the monologuing style of Hardcore History. I’m a little in awe of the quality of this show in light of it’s length. Few people have the patience to script out this much talking, and I was captivated by the meandering theme of how human beings can be commodified. If you are wrapped up in Fortnite or Netflix especially (or any form of modern media/entertainment, really) this is one to check out.
STONECOLDJACKSON - "attention"
It took 40 minutes to get there, but eventually this oddly named show touch on some of the same points as Let’s Know Things. This is the podcast on this list most closely tied to what a stereotypical pod vibe might be - two dudes rambling semi-coherently with a loose structure and no real central goal. I don’t have many of those in my listening diet, so this was refreshing, but I’m not sure I could do it every week.
Big Boy On Demand - "Stupidest Thing You’ve Done For Attention, 2 Chainz BIG Interview, and More!"
Big Boy On Demand, while really not my cup of tea, fit the theme of attention in a singular way. On the surface this episode is not very introspective, nor does it necessarily focus on bettering oneself. But the listener stories did make me think about the vast expanses between human experience, and the 2 Chainz interview (while confusingly short) contained a couple nuggets of parenting insight from the perspective of someone who grew up in poverty. All that said, the discomfiting prank call segments give a decent sense of what this radio-show-as-podcast is really all about - shock jockery at its...shock jockeryist.
Holmberg’s Morning Sickness - "Tuesday February 26, 2019"
Another entry in the radio-first category, this show’s title says it all - it is a morning show hosted by a dude who is exploiting the timeless yet oh-so-tired shtick of being aggressively misanthropic.This episode specifically is about chain restaurants and Guy Fieri and the baselessness of an all-approving critic. Clearly directed toward commuting suburbanites, this rage toward Olive Garden seems curiously placed.
This endeavor produced a fascinating stable of shows that almost certainly would otherwise never have reached my ears. Generally I found the experience to be quite rewarding, and will definitely pursue it again in some fashion. Let me know if you’ve got any thoughts on how to tweak this experiment, and I’ll happily entertain the idea of integrating them into the next Pod Piper Radio Scramble.
The sound that sparked the most comfort was, somehow, found in the airwaves of San Francisco based KNBR as the steady tone of Jon Miller called play-by-play for Giants games. As division rivals to my beloved Diamondbacks, I enjoyed silently rooting against the bay area team as they closed out games on the coast. It wasn’t always a clear signal, and sometimes it didn’t convey at all, but when it did I always kept the volume turned way down since I wasn’t listening with headphones and since my parents and sister slept in the adjacent rooms. My love of baseball has waxed and waned in the last couple decades, but the sensation of reaching into the darkness and connecting with the sound of a stranger’s voice a world away is a feeling that probably birthed a love of podcasting that’s going strong in its 15th year.
My near obsession with blowing through the episode list on my iPod then Kindle then phone has exposed me to more diverse voices than the average listener. Even so, I acknowledge I’m barely able to scratch the surface. Even if I devoted all my free time to listening, even with cranking up the speed to 4x, even with fast forwarding through the ads, my own biases would likely take me into the realm of the slickly produced and tightly written shows. How do I inject that healthy dose of randomness in my listening diet? I could turn on the radio again, I suppose, if I could find one, but that would still bump up against the walls of geographically prohibitive radio signals. (While my reach from northeastern Arizona all the way to San Francisco did span an impressive distance - upwards of 700 miles if you go as the crow - my current digs in the flat, semi-urban Midwest do not seem nearly as conducive) Well friends, I’m trying something here that just might get me the 2019 version of that feeling I felt back in the early 2000s. I call it the Pod Piper Radio Scramble, or PPRS in the spirit of 4-letter radio call signs.
Podcast Addict, my trusty podcatcher of choice, allows users to subscribe to a feed based on a word or phrase - something I believe you can do on Instagram if that’s a helpful reference. For the inaugural round of PPRS, I selected a single word and downed as many episodes as I could while still keeping up with my regular devotion to seeking out things I more readily expect to be awesome (a bloggers gotta blog, amirite?). Here are, in order of least to most recently heard, all the podcast episodes filtered my way via the word “attention.”
More Attention, Less Deficit - "To Tell or Not to Tell?"
If you have ADD, revealing this bit about you to your employer is a difficult decision. This short installment could be broadly transposed onto any private matter and the extent to which it intersects with one’s workplace.
Morning Coffee - "Time and attention"
This is something like a entrepreneurial pep talk. Kind of vague but short enough...and bookended by very large chunks of two different songs. A good listen to start the day if you’re not a morning person and maybe don’t really want your podcasts to tell essential or heart-wrenching stories.
Genius Network - "Media Master Class Part 1: How To Skyrocket Your Media Attention, Viewership and Audience with Paula Rizzo and Joe Polish"
Very markety; how to present yourself when angling for a television interview. A bit intriguing for it’s novelty, but highly irrelevant to my life.
Power of Families - "Paying Attention"
This is the podcast I’m least likely to have sought out intentionally, but it turned out to have some sage advice. Basically if you don’t listen to your kids tell you about the little things, they won’t tell you about the big things. Also, props for citing the Mary Oliver attention poem “Sometimes.” (“Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.”)
Stoic Meditations - "Pay attention to the past in order to tackle the future"
Short. Fine.
Beat your Genes - "Keeping attention in class, When Authority is altruistic, autism, war"
What an odd thing Beat Your Genes is - an evolutionary psychology call-in show podcast. This episode had a conspiratorial vibe to it, and was the closest thing to that strange alien/witchcraft/governmental-overreach AM radio world I found in this batch.
Tech Tonic - "James Williams on the attention economy"
This was great, and something I’d readily recommend: a former Google employee turns to philosophy to understand how the tech industry is distracting us from living our best lives.
Let’s Know Things - "Attention"
Host Colin Wright has a hint of Roman Mars and Dan Carlin in his voice, trending more toward the monologuing style of Hardcore History. I’m a little in awe of the quality of this show in light of it’s length. Few people have the patience to script out this much talking, and I was captivated by the meandering theme of how human beings can be commodified. If you are wrapped up in Fortnite or Netflix especially (or any form of modern media/entertainment, really) this is one to check out.
STONECOLDJACKSON - "attention"
It took 40 minutes to get there, but eventually this oddly named show touch on some of the same points as Let’s Know Things. This is the podcast on this list most closely tied to what a stereotypical pod vibe might be - two dudes rambling semi-coherently with a loose structure and no real central goal. I don’t have many of those in my listening diet, so this was refreshing, but I’m not sure I could do it every week.
Big Boy On Demand - "Stupidest Thing You’ve Done For Attention, 2 Chainz BIG Interview, and More!"
Big Boy On Demand, while really not my cup of tea, fit the theme of attention in a singular way. On the surface this episode is not very introspective, nor does it necessarily focus on bettering oneself. But the listener stories did make me think about the vast expanses between human experience, and the 2 Chainz interview (while confusingly short) contained a couple nuggets of parenting insight from the perspective of someone who grew up in poverty. All that said, the discomfiting prank call segments give a decent sense of what this radio-show-as-podcast is really all about - shock jockery at its...shock jockeryist.
Holmberg’s Morning Sickness - "Tuesday February 26, 2019"
Another entry in the radio-first category, this show’s title says it all - it is a morning show hosted by a dude who is exploiting the timeless yet oh-so-tired shtick of being aggressively misanthropic.This episode specifically is about chain restaurants and Guy Fieri and the baselessness of an all-approving critic. Clearly directed toward commuting suburbanites, this rage toward Olive Garden seems curiously placed.
This endeavor produced a fascinating stable of shows that almost certainly would otherwise never have reached my ears. Generally I found the experience to be quite rewarding, and will definitely pursue it again in some fashion. Let me know if you’ve got any thoughts on how to tweak this experiment, and I’ll happily entertain the idea of integrating them into the next Pod Piper Radio Scramble.
THE LIST
Do the Oscars really matter if Do the Right Thing wasn't recognized?
When a professional sports team wants a new stadium built, does a city consider what is really best for residents?
What health-related societal norms should we maybe reconsider passively accepting as standard?
What do Natalie Portman, Jonathan Franzen, and the New York Knicks have in common?
Should Facebook pay their content monitors more, considering the psychologically scarring workload?
Does anyone really know where 'Baby Shark' originated and how it spawned countless covers?
HONORABLE MENTION
Comments
Post a Comment