Old-Time Radio Reborn: Why Podcasts Work
Narrative is the backbone of any successful podcast, although there's a whole lot more to great audio entertainment than just the stories.
Alex Goldman is co-host of Reply All, a podcast about the internet presented via Gimlet Media. His work has appeared on On the Media, 99% Invisible, Slate, and elsewhere. Find him on Twitter at @agoldmund
Alex Goldman: What makes a good podcast is a real attention to narrative and writing and trying to tell stories that haven't already been told. A lot of shows are actually doing just radio play essentially. There are shows like The Truth that are actually doing radio fiction. It's like The Shadow or Welcome to Night Vale. It's like '30s radio. It's like '30s serialized radio. And honestly, and I don't remember who coined the phrase, but radio is the theater of the mind. It's like you can – you know how they say a picture is worth a thousand words? Well, a word is worth a million pictures. If I say tree, you can visualize millions of different trees. So we give you these stories; we give you sound, but you create the world in your head and there's something immensely satisfying about that. I mean you know roughly what we're talking about, but much like reading a book, it's like you decide what the characters look like; you decide what the host's look like; you decide what environment they're in; where it's being recorded; what the subject look like; what the world that the subjects are describing looks like. There's something really — there's a certain level of imagination inspiring and control that you get with radio that you don't get with movies or 3D or any other modern technology.
Narrative is the backbone of any successful podcast, though there's a whole lot more to great audio entertainment than just the stories. According to Reply All's Alex Goldman, podcasts and radio are "the theater of the mind." If a picture is worth a thousand words, Goldman says, a word is worth a million pictures. Thus, the most important aspect of a good podcast is the ability of its hosts and producers to spark visual storytelling in the listener's mind using only the power of sound.
Why Elon Musk doesn't like Jeff Bezos's space colonies
Elon Musk took issue with recent ideas for space exploration from Jeff Bezos.
- Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos have sparred over space exploration previously.
- Musk wants to focus on Mars while Bezos has the moon and space colonies as goals.
- In a recent tweet, Musk called out Bezos's plans for space colonies as unrealistic.
10 new things we’ve learned about death
If you don't want to know anything about your death, consider this your spoiler warning.
- For centuries cultures have personified death to give this terrifying mystery a familiar face.
- Modern science has demystified death by divulging its biological processes, yet many questions remain.
- Studying death is not meant to be a morbid reminder of a cruel fate, but a way to improve the lives of the living.
- Push Past Negative Self-Talk: Give Yourself the Proper Fuel to Attack the World, with David Goggins, Former NAVY SealIf you've ever spent 5 minutes trying to meditate, you know something most people don't realize: that our minds are filled, much of the time, with negative nonsense. Messaging from TV, from the news, from advertising, and from difficult daily interactions pulls us mentally in every direction, insisting that we focus on or worry about this or that. To start from a place of strength and stability, you need to quiet your mind and gain control. For former NAVY Seal David Goggins, this begins with recognizing all the negative self-messaging and committing to quieting the mind. It continues with replacing the negative thoughts with positive ones.
SMARTER FASTER trademarks owned by The Big Think, Inc. All rights reserved.
