Your intention should be something that really lights you up. You need to feel it in your chest, in your gut. It is the verb that connects you to your audience, the umbilical cord that takes your energy to them and brings theirs back to you. Intention is action.
~ Angie Flynn-McIver
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A short 1/2-hour walk from my house is a scattering of boulders. I try to remember to come up here as often as possible. My friend Mike once called bouldering “pebble wrestling” (visualize a relatively tiny person, trying to wrestle an enormous rock—hopeless! …but oh so fun) which made me chuckle and has stuck with me.
I call this face “Green Garden Wall” (my riff on a classic, named “Red Garden Wall” in Colorado) on what is usually called “Obvious Rock” (sometimes we call it “Blob Rock”). This little wall is about 10′ tall, and there’s about 30′ of width; There’s an offset nearer that tree, so this little “wall” even has a small inside and outside corner to fiddle with. It’s absolutely covered in various mosses and lichens and… shhhhhh… someone seems to have been here many times with teeny tiny wire brushes to expose a myriad of little places for fingertips and toes.
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Science fiction has the capacity to inspire by setting the vision of a radically better future, and by making it clear that the future won’t happen unless we put in the work.
~ Dan Wang
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For me, fully internalizing this one powerful piece of inspiring profanity has been transformative. But I still find that returning regularly to the well makes all this work even better. So I downloaded both of the Goggins’s audiobooks and worked through them in little chunks on my morning walks over the period of a month. Then I moved on to Peter Attia’s Outlive, and Jocko Willink’s Extreme Ownership.
~ Peter Adeney, from The Ultimate Life Coach
I really do know what I should be doing. (I have no idea if you, or anyone else, does too.) But I can tell you that even though I know… it’s still tough to do the soul-crushing work. I’ve not read any of the books above—although Outlive is on my to-read pile.
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There will be no war and there will be no greed and all of the children will know how to read.
~ Gene Roddenberry
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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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Every man has some peculiar train of thought which he falls back upon when he is alone. This, to a great degree, molds the man.
~ Dugald Stewart
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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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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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