Mar 3, 2021
How many podcasts do you listen to in a week?
If it’s more than 4, that’s how I can tell you’re old
I knew that my youth had faded when I chose to listen to talk radio instead of music. And It wasn’t out of necessity or anything like that. My car at the time had a tape deck, but it connected to a CD player I could use. More than that, I had even picked up a 4 dollar cassette tape of Purple Rain by Prince, and if you’ve ever heard it you know you really don’t need anything else to listen to once you possess it. I had just aged to a point where I wanted hear whatever radio jocks were going on about.
Sometimes this could be the zany randomness of college radio or black public radio we still had kicking in Austin at the time, but honestly, it was usually personalities available during commutes. I’d listen to people like Deb and that red haired guy that liked Green Day and Foo Fighters or I’d get caught up with Lunchbox, Amy, and host Bobby Bones who got in an epic fight with Wendy Williams one time live.
These were basically the radio personalities that were expressly not radical, non-political, kind of uncool, and completely mainstream. It would break down to at least 22 minutes of mom approved radio before the next top 40 hit would start playing. When that happened, I would change the station to find another talking talk show to listen to.
I had to wonder… How not radical, non-political, uncool, and completely mainstream had I become back then? Did my band mates lie to me at the time? “Nah Mike… don’t worry about that. Shake it off and come play some music with your ska band”
Old Man Alert: Introducing Podcasts
It took me a while to graduate to podcasts. Once I did, they were easy to replace talk radio with. It’s like having infinite radio stations about specific things you’re into right down to the murder. “Oh you want the 12 hour deep dive into killer clown guy, not the carny guy. I thought you were weird for a second.”
I’m pretty sure 85% of podcasts are about crimes — mostly murder or genocide (go big or go home right?). The rest are celebrities talking to each other. Then again, maybe all my podcasts just feed into a certain type of podcast because I mostly follow Cracked alumni around. My favorite show is Behind the Bastards with Robert Evans who muses about something horrible I feel I should have paid more attention to when I learned about it in history class on Cody Johnston and Katy Stoll’s Some More News or on Adam Tod Brown’s Unpops Podcast Network the first time.
So how old does this make me now? Not my actual age, but my relevance age? I need to slam at least 3 to 4 podcasts a week just to keep up, and unfortunately the older my actual age, the more education I’ve accumulated to be familiar with horrible things. I get to be like, “oh I’ve heard of those nazis!” or “every shooter seems to be an out racist with a history of violence against women” or “I spend too much time thinking about what ‘faschy boys are up to on the internet.’” That’s that old man knowledge. Guess I’m into history now too.
Podcasts are pretty much deep dives into everything that is terrible in the world, because they are either about something horrible or a reminder of how much of your time this frivolous episode is wasting. There is no in between. And now everyone you’ve ever liked has their own show in addition to rotating through several other shows.
I guess that’s because anyone can do it. In fact, I’m going to start doing it. You’ll be able to get The Mike Dynamo Power Hour with Mike Dynamo some day in the near future. It’ll be the greatest 15 minutes in Play On Demand Broadcasting.
So this is how I know I’m old. I went from enjoying my podcasts to wanting to start one because I’m tired of everyone else’s podcasts.
Now get off my lawn.
