Author: Craig Constantine

You can totally just say you don’t know

September 24

Our mission, as podcasters is to say “I don’t know” when that is the case, and even more importantly, to make our guests feel delighted to say they don’t know when that’s the case.

At the end of the day there’s an awful lot of what I do as an actor that I don’t necessarily understand – nor should I. One of the necessary evils of acting is doing an awful lot of interviews, which is interesting when you’re asked good questions but it can sometimes be mind-numbing. You feel like, “Why do I have to explain myself? I have nothing to say.” You’re not allowed to say, “I don’t know,” but you don’t always know why you did what you did.

~ Jude Law, from Jude Law: “It’s Not You”

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‘nuf said.

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Self less

September 22

Let’s bend relationship advice to apply to podcasting: Feeling stuck in a rut with your podcasting? Go have a conversation with a guest where your entire intention is to be of service to them.

The asymmetry between wanting to know others and being known by them presents an inherent problem, because relationships require reciprocity: If I don’t do the work to know you deeply, a relationship doesn’t form in which you will know me. This vicious cycle—Poe syndrome again—is made much worse when you are lonely to begin with […] In other words, if no one knows you well and you are thus lonely, that may make you more self-focused and less interested in others, making it much less likely for others to want to get to know you well.

~ Arthur C. Brooks, from Why It’s Nice to Know You

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Question: What would happen, if your intention with a podcast episode, was to help some else’s well-being— if your intention was only to demonstrate to them that you care? What if you go into it hoping for nothing for yourself?

So not an intention of, “I want to know X, so I’ll ask good questions.”

But rather, “I think they’d enjoy talking about X, so I’ll ask good questions.”

Answer: It’s totally amazing. It alters your own life. You should go do it 500 times.

(Wether or not you turn those conversation into podcasts is irrelevant of course.)

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Humans being

September 20

The How Sound episode, “Getting inside someone else’s skin” (May 14, 2019 from the Sound School Podcast) contains insightful comments regarding why in-person is so great.

(Sorry, I cannot find a web-page specifically for this episode. You’ll have to find it in your favorite podcast app.)

Too long; didn’t listen? Here are my thoughts and opinions…

Listeners can tell when we have captured “humans being” and that can only be done when we humans are in our natural environment. That’s field-recording… pointing a mic at someone in the real-world.

Anything else is not the same thing. Wether that’s in a full studio, over a call even with video on, or when I carry a bunch of gear and give them a mic and great headphones sitting in their home… none of those are the same as field-recording a human being (and I intend both meanings there.)

Anything else is some degree of “disembodied and silenced” — quoted because that is a nugget taken from the podcast.

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Do more than just take the photo

September 18

I’ve given a lot of birthday gifts in my years. (I’m sure you have too!) But this photo is a gift I’m particularly proud of.

First, a map: My mother is one of 27 first-cousins. (Her mother was one of eight children.) My mother is one of the youngest of those first cousins (perhaps the youngest, I forget.) Two of my mother’s first-cousins are the man seated center (in the front row, his wife’s arm interlocked) and next to him is his sister, Cocetta (who everyone called Connie).

Several years ago, Connie had a birthday party. An enormous party. An enormous party of boisterous people. At one point, I started going around and forcefully demanding family members proceed into the other room. This wasn’t appreciated by many in the moment, but once I got a dozen people moving, it caught on. And then many people passed their phones to a few volunteers to start snapping. I expect you’ve experienced being corralled into a group photo such as I’m describing. It’s not the greatest family photo ever taken. But it was taken.

Then—and this is the part that few do—after the party I hounded several people until I found the best photo and I ordered professionally printed and framed versions of this photo. I ordered one, quite large version of this photo which was given to Connie for her home. Several smaller versions were given to her closest relatives (like the one in my hallway, shown above.)

Don’t just take those photos, considering gifting them as physical mementos too.

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What’s our five-paragraph essay?

September 14

The article I’m linking to below is about AI — wait don’t run away. It made me actually think about: What is the purpose of the five-paragraph essay? How does one write such a thing—what exactly am I doing when I go through the soul-sucking process of doing it?

So you don’t have to read the short, linked article… but I recommend it.

The five-paragraph essay is a mainstay of high school writing instruction, designed to teach students how to compose a simple thesis and defend it in a methodical, easily graded package. It’s literature analysis at its most basic, and most rigid, level.

~ Emma Camp, from Rethinking the 5-Paragraph Essay in the Age of AI

Back to the question in my title:

In podcasting, what is our five-paragraph essay?

The five-paragraph essay is a blunt tool, sure. But it is clearly one, important but small, piece of a large puzzle called “learning to write well.” You do it very early in “learning to write well” and then you leave it behind.

What is our five-paragraph essay?

Any one of the following could be our five-paragraph essay…

  • Write a terrific, single, “hook sentence” from a podcast episode.
  • Write a paragraph of 3-5 sentences from a podcast episode.
  • Find at least one quotable portion from a podcast episode.
  • Write a list of takeaways in a specific style and with specific formatting.

Why do I say those things? Because once I understood how to do them by hand, turning to tools like AI is not cheating. The AI does a solid B+ (ref article above) job, which I can then finish to my A-level.

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Good questions

September 1

You can’t say that it’s a question of national peculiarities or even entirely political peculiarities. I mean, I think when the technological and applied scientific means are developed they just tend to be used. I mean, I think one can say that the whole history of recent times […] shows that if you plant the seed […] it grows and it tends to grow according to the law of its own being, and the laws of its being are not necessarily the same as the laws of our being.

~ Aldous Huxley, from 1961: Aldous Huxley on the power of TECHNOLOGY!

It’s interesting to hear an author speak about his own ideas. I’ve read Brave New World and a selection of his essays (Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow). That short video—I’m linking to YouTube, I hope I don’t regret that in another decade ÂŻ\_(ツ)_/¯—contains a few questions; Huxley presents more questions than answers. And they’re just as relevant more than half a century later.

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100 issues of my “7 for Sunday” email

August 28

As some of you know, I write a weekly email that isn’t related to my podcasting efforts. On Sunday, Sept 1, issue 100 of 7 for Sunday will go out. (See https://7forsunday.com to sign up or to simply read any issue.)

From the first issue of 7 for Sunday, I’ve always wondered if I’d make it to 100, and I’m glad I stuck with it. Some weeks it was a right struggle to get it done. In a very real sense, knowing there were readers out there gave me a goal to get through some dark days. Yes, external validation is not a great idea. But also, the life preserver that saves you is necessarily thrown by another.

Thanks to a suggestion from 7 for Sunday reader Wayne, the centennial issue is about books. 7 books, of course. Each book is presented with bibliofervor (the urge to leap out of one’s chair, race to find a friend, and press a book into their hands, see Issue № 60.)

Sometimes people express amazement at all that I get done—

Please realize that I struggle just as much as everyone does to create. And, boy howdy!, do I hope that any part of anything I ever do somehow helps you, in even the slightest way, to move forward!

I appreciate your time and attention, and I don’t take it for granted.

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Benevolence

August 22

Benevolence and self-direction (described below) are usually near the top of the values we all share. Each of us also has an internal hierarchy of values, where we rank our values based on those we find extremely important to those that don’t really motivate us at all.

~ Chris Bailey, from There are just 10 basic values

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Benevolence—in my opinion—only pops up on our radar once we have enough time, energy and resources. Whether or not it’s clear in that moment, that’s because we, for the first time, manage an honest look back and actually realize all the places where we’ve received help from others. So that’s nice for ourselves, but also for the entire human race.

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Victims of our own technology

August 20

Just a cou­ple of days ago, Apple CEO Tim Cook tweet­ed out a video pro­mot­ing, “the new iPad Pro: the thinnest prod­uct we’ve ever cre­at­ed.” The response has been over­whelm­ing, and over­whelm­ing­ly neg­a­tive: for many view­ers, the ad’s imagery of a hydraulic press crush­ing a heap of musi­cal instru­ments, art sup­plies, and vin­tage enter­tain­ment into a sin­gle tablet inad­ver­tent­ly artic­u­lat­ed a dis­com­fort they’ve long felt with tech­nol­o­gy’s direc­tion in the past cou­ple of decades. As the nov­el­ist Hari Kun­zru put it, “Crush­ing the sym­bols of human cre­ativ­i­ty to pro­duce a homog­e­nized brand­ed slab is pret­ty much where the tech indus­try is at in 2024.”

~ Colin Marshall, from Aldous Huxley Explains How Man Became “the Victim of His Own Technology” (1961)

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Setting aside the marketing brouhaha, I was gobsmacked by the phrase, “Crushing the symbols of human creativity to produce a homogenized brand-slab […]” Yes, “homogenized brand-slab” is brilliant and feels like a line of dialog from THX-1138. But I was really fish-hooked by the “symbols of human creativity” part. I talk a lot and often these days about creativity, but I’d never really considered the question: What are symbols—images, place holders, iconography—of creativity?

Because it doesn’t seem to make sense to me why a paint brush, or a trumpet (for example) represent creativity. It’s the mind of the person that does the creativity part… and so: What are symbols of creativity?

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I wish

August 18

I wish when I was younger I knew what I know today, what I feel like today, a kind of ease with myself. Because when you’re younger you are much more intense and everything’s much more important and you look back and you think, “Oh what was that all about?” Nothing is that important, just live your life because we’re here so briefly.

~ Anthony Hopkins, from Anthony Hopkins

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Oh good, it’s not just me who thinks this. Because, if I could take that knowledge with me, I’d really like to again be the age I was, when I thought I’d surely have my shit together by the time I was the age I am now.

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