HAVE YOU HEARD? // Chew The Chat

I think like most people, if not everyone, it’s just to relax and let it be. Trust yourself and let it roll- we all get the jitters and it’s okay.

It depends on the style of podcast but someone who is honest. As simple as that. I think that’s the real power of podcasts for me, especially long form conversations, that is when we can connect to the truth and let it bleed into our own lives, be it good, bad, funny or ugly.

The same as a guest. Being honest. For a podcast like Chew The Chat, where we discuss childhood and family dynamics, you’ve got to be passionate and you’ve got to be curious and not afraid to go into the unknown – not just with the guest but yourself also. If you’re excited then that energy transfers to the guest and when they feel like they are in safe hands then they relax and it becomes a feedback loop to those listening. And of course it helps if you can muster a quick wit and relaxed sense of humour. Humour it seems is the remedy for all things at the right time.

Sitting down to edit an episode together and realising that the audio files had disappeared into the digital void, the back up hadn’t worked and it makes no sense whatsoever. Two hours of wonderful insightful chat GONE forever! Luckily nothing during a show just yet (arguably) but it’s early days for Chew The Chat.

The DIY punk rock ethics. No agendas, no censorship, no restrictions, no rules, no hierarchy, no food chain, just total freedom. There’s this wonderful communal connection with all podcasters permeating through the community that seems to carry this energy or feeling that we all kind of know we are free individually as well as collectively and that’s a feeling that we don’t experience too much in modern western culture these days, or at least it feels like that to me. We are also being educated in areas we love as well as areas of the previously unknown in a truthful way through others’ direct experiences and I think that helps keep us sane. It’s like being happy for everyone else removes your own baggage and judgements to a degree and it serves all of us. I hope we can continue on this path as the industry/community grows. I’m reading Yuval Noah Harari’s ‘Sapiens’ at the moment and it feels like any evolution or progress we humans make inevitably becomes complex, divided and ultimately commodified! So far podcasting seems to be out on its own and managing to stay out of the grips of the machine. That’s fascinating to me and I think it’s what we all yearn for and also why it’s working the way it is. Long live the Podcast!

You know it sounds soft but – nothing. If people have decided to give it a go and create something on their own steam then that is to be celebrated whether it’s your kind of thing or not. You don’t listen to what you don’t jive with anyway…  I just get a little bump when I see someone is trying to do something true that requires some strength from somewhere within.

Well it has to be ads doesn’t it. In the world I’m painting a picture of we are ’gathering tribes’ sharing our secrets with one another and no one goes hungry but the real world, the one highlighted in ‘Sapiens’ shows the human condition has to be fed – that’s our dichotomy. We live to create and evolve our ideas but we ultimately turn them into comfort. You know they say that satisfaction is the death of desire. But I get it and accept it. I thinks ads are still in a safe place in podcast land because we can choose to use brands and products we genuinely believe in and that is how we maintain the truth and integrity of what we’ve started.

It’s got to be the first one I think. It’s the one that set us on the road. I think like most podcasters, your episodes are like your babies, you love them all equally but differently. The first one for me got the party started and boy was it a party in episodes 1&2 with quite literally a party starter as a guest.

It would be hard not to mention ’The Joe Rogan Experience’ full stop as it’s been such a huge influence in my life. Nine years ago at a crucial time of my personal maturation it became a complete education both internally and externally – re framing the world as I understood it, more so than my formal education by a landslide and then some. It’s of course so huge now it’s become biblical in podcast terms these days.  But the podcast that means the most to me is ‘Tangentially Speaking with Dr Christoper Ryan’ this podcast in many ways is like my personal therapy. So many episodes I could pick out on any given day. This podcast was a huge inspiration for Chew The Chat because I had been touched by and connected to so many guests who were without high profile or celebrity status but who live amazing, normal, simple lives all with stories of universal truth, which is what Chew The Chat Podcast is about, giving a voice to the unexpected people. We all have interesting lives, some of us where scars, some of us where badges, some of us where our hearts on our sleeves and some of us hide in the shadows of ourselves but we are all richer if we share in each other’s stories once we allow ourselves to learn them.