Keeping It Real
and earnest enquiry
Since Memhaz has returned (second episode of series 5 recording this evening!) I have been trying to come up with a way of describing what the podcast is. This is surprisingly difficult[1] because although there are a number of topics we return to frequently, listing those out would sound bizarre and incoherent and doesn’t really get at what we’re really “about”. Some of it is just the way our conversations drift, which I would hope is part of the charm of the show; some of it is our avowed stance, from the off, of indifference-to-hostility to the audience; some of it is our comfort with our present level of prominence; but a lot of it is a desire not to play the game.
Maybe we’re just being difficult to be perverse, but if you really stick at it you go from being just passively uncommercial to actively anti-commercial. Obviously we don’t want to sell ads for B2C and SAAS companies, but we take it one step further by avoiding being the kind of people who might be asked. For a description, I've settled on "keeping it real, striving for a spirit of earnest enquiry; a slow, sometimes-clumsy but always-heartfelt grasping-towards-truth", which might be a little cringe but describes our ethos, which hopefully is a truer description than a narrow focus on topic.
And not just for me! It's probably even more so for people who aren't us or existing listeners, since we’ve made over 150 episodes of this show and only one is currently available. This is because we started making the show in 2014: we’ve changed and I’m not sure we would necessarily stand by everything we’ve said over the years (I’m not sure how much I stand by things I’ve said over the last few weeks!). It’s also because I have an apparent pathological fondness for deleting things I’ve made from the internet, see (or not!): every previous blog of mine. ↩︎