"Hey, I can do that."
Perhaps the five most dangerous words anyone has ever said upon observing a piece of work being done.
Well, six months ago, my friends Samir, Anand and myself said these exact words. At the time, we were listening to podcasts. Plenty of them. So we spent the resulting half-year learning how to record audio, how to edit audio, and most importantly, how to speak in a clear manner and with enough personality to sustain a listener over 45 minutes of thought provoking dialogue.
Now, I'm excited to present the first episode of Boombox The Podcast.
Boombox is about longform discussion in a shortform world. Mostly, Samir, Anand and I felt like all too often we'd be swiping through our news feeds. An article would go viral, we'd see the flippant commentary, and then we'd think to our respective selves, "Hmm. I wish I could have a longer conversation about that."
We also felt like there was this consensus about Millenials. And the consensus held that Millenials valued shortform informational transactions - tweets, six-second Vine videos, and three sentence customer reviews. But there's a large percentage of the Millenial demo who still value longform conversation, Socratic methods of dialogue, and even debate.
Boombox is our attempt to bring that conversation to an audience willing to listen. I hope you'll be one of those people. Each week we'll pick one news trend and examine it through all angles. In the past few weeks as we've developed 'rehearsal episodes', we've looked at tweets immediately following Transparent's Golden Globes acceptance speeches. We listened to other podcasts reporting on gentrification, and we even asked strangers what they think about modern love and the quickest way to fall in love, when Mandy Len Catron's NYTimes piece went viral.
And if you think the Boombox namesake is in homage to arguably most famous and greatest modern movie romance, you're entirely correct. Maybe we'll explain that homage in an episode one day. Only one way to find out...