I've fallen off of recommending some things I really like, but here are a few podcasts I'm really into lately:
Industry Standard - Barry Katz is an agent and manager of a lot of famous people. He's been fired by pretty much everyone you know who's a successful comedian: Dave Chappelle, Dane Cook, Louis, C.K., etc. but he's pretty zen-like and wise in how he negotiates the business of show business. I find a lot of his advice is applicable to a lot of areas of life management and being tenacious, but accepting of your circumstances while trying to be better. A favorite interview is with Peter Engel, on how Saved by The Bell was created despite no one really wanting it.
99% Invisible - This is a podcast that takes a taste from the dryer, public radio types. Think Radiolab, This American Life, etc. It's ostensibly about design, but some of it goes into the history of design or why things wind up as they are or how they'll wind up with human interaction. Some of my favorites cover the "Love" park in Philadelphia, Galludet University, and the death penalty as an ethical conundrum for architects and other designers.The best part, which is debateable, is that episodes are pretty short at around 15 to 20 minutes.
The Memory Palace - Like the previously mentioned podcast, 99PI, this one also has the public radio feel. This one covers small points in history, and especially the people in history, that have been forgotten. It chooses to focus on a person or event to remind you of why they should have been memorable. People like William J. Sidis, a boy genius who graduated from Harvard at 16 years old. Harriet Quimby, a writer and influential lady who was one of the first certified pilots, much less a woman pilot, in America. The forgotten engineer who, in three stages, raised the city of Chicago 10 feet, expanded fresh-water gathering and waste-water distribution, and ultimately reversed the flow of the Chicago river down to the Mississippi river. The one I really like is the story of Samuel F. B. Morse ("Distance"), which I transcribed below. Maybe you'll like a podcast I don't know about and share too!
“Samuel Finley Breese Morse spent the first 35 years of his life learning to paint: at Andover, at Yale, and at the London Academy. He studied the works of the masters. To learn how Michelangelo built bodies that seemed to pulse and shudder out of mere oil and shadow and cross hatch. To learn how Rafael summoned the spark of inner life with a single strike of pure white in the dusky ocher of a noble woman's eye, to learn how to create illusions of space and distance, to learn how to conjure the ineffable through the mere aggregations of lines and dots on stretched canvas.
Industry Standard - Barry Katz is an agent and manager of a lot of famous people. He's been fired by pretty much everyone you know who's a successful comedian: Dave Chappelle, Dane Cook, Louis, C.K., etc. but he's pretty zen-like and wise in how he negotiates the business of show business. I find a lot of his advice is applicable to a lot of areas of life management and being tenacious, but accepting of your circumstances while trying to be better. A favorite interview is with Peter Engel, on how Saved by The Bell was created despite no one really wanting it.
99% Invisible - This is a podcast that takes a taste from the dryer, public radio types. Think Radiolab, This American Life, etc. It's ostensibly about design, but some of it goes into the history of design or why things wind up as they are or how they'll wind up with human interaction. Some of my favorites cover the "Love" park in Philadelphia, Galludet University, and the death penalty as an ethical conundrum for architects and other designers.The best part, which is debateable, is that episodes are pretty short at around 15 to 20 minutes.
The Memory Palace - Like the previously mentioned podcast, 99PI, this one also has the public radio feel. This one covers small points in history, and especially the people in history, that have been forgotten. It chooses to focus on a person or event to remind you of why they should have been memorable. People like William J. Sidis, a boy genius who graduated from Harvard at 16 years old. Harriet Quimby, a writer and influential lady who was one of the first certified pilots, much less a woman pilot, in America. The forgotten engineer who, in three stages, raised the city of Chicago 10 feet, expanded fresh-water gathering and waste-water distribution, and ultimately reversed the flow of the Chicago river down to the Mississippi river. The one I really like is the story of Samuel F. B. Morse ("Distance"), which I transcribed below. Maybe you'll like a podcast I don't know about and share too!
“Samuel Finley Breese Morse spent the first 35 years of his life learning to paint: at Andover, at Yale, and at the London Academy. He studied the works of the masters. To learn how Michelangelo built bodies that seemed to pulse and shudder out of mere oil and shadow and cross hatch. To learn how Rafael summoned the spark of inner life with a single strike of pure white in the dusky ocher of a noble woman's eye, to learn how to create illusions of space and distance, to learn how to conjure the ineffable through the mere aggregations of lines and dots on stretched canvas.
He learned how to paint.
In 1825, Morse was living in New Haven, Connecticut with his wife Lucretia and their two young sons and a third child on the way was due any day. One night a courier delivered a message:
‘The city of New York wants to pay you $1000 to paint a portrait of Marquis de Lafayette.’
The hero of the revolution was coming to Washington to celebrate the 50-year anniversary of the start of the war and he would sit for Morse if the painter could leave right away. So, he packed his easel and his brushes and his paints. He packed clothes good enough to wear when meeting a man like Lafayette. He kissed his pregnant wife and left that night.
On another night, a week later, Morse was in his rented studio in Washington preparing for the arrival, the next morning, of his distinguished subject. He heard a knock on the door. There was a courier, breathless and dirty from a hard ride on a hard road, handing him a note that was 5 words long:
‘Your dear wife is convalescent.’
He left that night.
He rode for 6 days straight on horseback, in the backs of juttering wagons, wrapped in blankets against the cold wind of October nights. When he made it to New Haven and ran through fallen leaves up to the house on Whitney Avenue.
He learned that his wife was dead.
He learned that his wife was dead.
In fact, she had died before the courier had knocked on his door in Washington.
In fact, she had already been buried some morning while he was on the road. While he was racing home to be by her side and sit with her while she got better.
Samuel Finley Breese Morse spent the next 45 years of his life trying to make sure no one would have to feel the way he felt that night ever again.
Samuel Finley Breese Morse spent the next 45 years inventing the telegraph, turning real space and real distance into illusion. Developing Morse code, dots and lines that could translate the stuff of real lives and dying wives”
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