Chris Lydon's pilot show on PRI
“A brief response to Chris Lydon’s pilot for his Open Source radio program on Public Radio International.”
Dave listened to the pilot episode of the new radio show “Open Source” hosted by Chris Lydon, and wanted to share his thoughts. Winer discusses how he prefers a more casual, rough style of podcasting rather than highly polished radio production. He argues that creativity and authenticity are more important than technical perfection, drawing an analogy to a child’s artwork. Winer encourages Chris Lydon to embrace the more casual podcasting style, rather than being overly critical of audio quality. He also sends well wishes to Adam Curry for the debut of his new show on Sirius satellite radio.
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Transcript
This transcript was automatically generated.
Good morning everybody. This is
a brief, this is Dave Winer
first and this is a
very brief morning coffee notes
for Friday May 13th 2005. Today
I listen to
Chris Leiden’s pilot broadcast
or actually pilot podcast of
his new
radio show on PRI called Open
Source and I was gonna write a
little essay and
then I thought well how
appropriate would it be to
write an essay when I
could actually just like open
up my microphone right you know
a little
recorder app and my microphone
and just record a little
response. So anyway let
me just set the stage for you.
I listened to Chris’s podcast.
I was walking north on the beach starting about a couple miles south of C rescent Beach in Florida. I was actually walking south not north sorry and on the way south I walked on the sand. The beach here is very wide and very flat and it was it wasn’t exactly low tide but it certainly wasn’t anything remotely close to high tide so there was lots and lots of sand and it’s flat and it’s not mushy sand it’s it’s sort of like it’s like walking on pavement so it ’s not really comfortable to walk barefoot so I wear these sandals rubber sandals and because you can also walk in the water with the rubber sandals which is kind of cool but they’re good for walking on the sort of hard pack sand which is much better than walking on the soft sand and the soft sand where it’s sort of like every step is a trudge and this isn’t like that this is like walking on a sidewalk it’s really comfortable and every so often you come to an inlet a little inlet in the sand where the water from the waves it’s sort of like a little tide pool and as the wave comes in the water comes up and it never fully goes all the way out and so you get your feet a little wet which is kind of refreshing the water this time of year already isn’t really very refreshing it’s already quite warm which makes for good swimming it’s not shocking although it kind of liked it when it was really cold a couple of months ago when the water was much colder and then when you go in swimming of course well it was kind of hard to get acclimated but when you came out your you felt like good to your bones it was so nice it’s a really nice sort of nice bony sort of nice feeling anyway so I walked a half an hour south and then I turned around and walked back and coming north it took me more than a half hour because because I walked a little more slowly because I walked in the water up to about my knees and points and of course as the waves would come in and we get deeper and as the waves would go out it would get more shallow and of course I enjoy that way of walking much more it’s and and on the way south I mostly listened to Jay Rosen and Lex from from Greensboro and on the way north Lisa Williams who I think stole the show she was the star she was talking about as always I mean I don’t just say that because I like to sort of you know I mean sometimes you feel weird about it because well you know it’s like people might think what you’re saying that because she’s a woman but Lisa and you know we try to be gender balanced in everything we do right and he can’t do it in the blog world it’s just it’s impossible there just aren’t enough women and so it’s you know it’s but I tell you Lisa is one of those there are like two kinds of women there sorry oh boy like an intro for this whatever see that that’s the problem is that women have a so intimidated they make all kinds of incredibly personal and deep statements about men like Halley suit talks about what it means to be an alpha male and and Shelly Powers talks about she makes my whole gender responsible for the sort of pigishness of one group of people who put on a put on conferences hey they exclude me too you know it’s not just they exclude women I find that places that exclude people generally I tend to get excluded you know I think it’ll make a lot of people uncomfortable part of it is because I’m like Jewish and there’s a lot of anti-semitism in the world and you know and it’s not considered a cause it’s not you don’t hear it people go go let’s be balanced you know ethnically balanced and I think a lot of the stuff that I was getting in Nashville honest goodness I think a lot of it was anti-semitism you should see some of the cartoons they drew I was shocked that they made me look like a rabbi and I don’t really look like a rabbi I mean I don’t think I do I’ve got a lot of like you know non-Jewish blood in me so you know well you know whatever I am Jewish though anyway I digress Lisa Williams is one of those women who never makes an issue out of she just but she belongs and she’s great and I’ve included her as the discussion leader at BligerCon and she was one of the regulars at Berkman Thursdays and she really she really did steal the show she has this sort of charm to her that is just you know it’s refreshing and then Doug K came on and Doug explained what podcasting was about and and then Ben Walker who Ben Ben doesn’t like me and I know that because he’s come out and said it quite a few times and and I think he doesn’t like me because I said some things that he didn’t like about public radio we had a you know whatever he asked me what I thought once he he said you’re actually he told me what I thought he said you like public radio because he gives you all this information and you know it keeps you informed and I raised my hand I said no no that’s not why I like public radio because I do like public radio and I said I like it because it’s relaxing and it’s true I mean I don’t really listen public radio very much now I don’t know why I can’t tell you why but it’s the truth but you know when I lived in Boston when I would be working I would keep public radio on all the time while I was doing you know technical work or writing work or whatever and I believe me if it weren’t relaxing I couldn’t if it were mentally and intellectually stimulating I couldn’t have it on while I was working and so Ben you know you gotta sort of trust me on that and so one of the things that I was evangelizing and one of the reasons Ben didn’t like me or if so I gathered was because I was you know an evangelist of podcast ing and although it wasn’t at the time called podcasting it is in every sense what eventually became to be known as podcast ing and it was kind of interesting I wanted Chris if Chris were sort of more and Chris is a friend of Ben’s and he said as much and and maybe this is why you don’t want friends interview and other friends because now one question I would have asked Ben had I been interviewing and was hey Ben am I okay now that you like podcasting because I mean Ben has the podcasting religion he really gets it he although I have to say that Chris could use a kick in the ass about podcasting which is why I picked up the microphone and decided to do this podcast today because Chris well I love you and I think you’re great and I really hope I expect your show is gonna be great the sooner you get this particular bug out of your butt the sooner your show is gonna go and soar to great new heights and the problem is this is that and I’m gonna project wildly here and I ’m gonna tell you why Chris has the attitude that he has and I could be way wrong but honestly I don’t think I am and Chris gotta know I hope you’re listening to this you gotta know that this is I’m in the spirit of of wanting to be helpful and and and to sort of like save you some time basically it this is what I think they’re a Chris is a radio professional and does a wonderful job of interviewing people and and his polish is you know second to none and you know their show you know they hit all the marks I don’t even know how they do it I mean you know it’s sort of like you know how to how does somebody make a website flow well well that I know how to do but how do you make a radio show flow the way Chris does it and Mary and whoever else is working on it you know maybe at some point I’ll be that way but it’s really actually not one of my goals you know I like doing a rough radio program I like doing a rough podcast which is what you’re listening to right now I like it rough I like it rough because as I’ve said so many times before is that when it’s too processed I’m suspicious that you know it’s my clue that the humanity has been sucked out of it and it’s that’s the nutrition you know that I get from it’s when it becomes soothing and relaxing but if it if it has a rough sort of miss to it a lack of production well you can’t listen to that in the background it’s sort of like hey this guy’s talking to me and you know it’s kind of distracting if somebody ’s talking to you while you’re trying to get some work done so so when a professional hears podcasts what do they snap to what’s there how do they you know what do they come on to oh well quality is really bad it’s really shit it ’s awful stuff most of its crap blah blah blah blah well no Chris it’s not crap somebody thinks it’s not crap somebody thinks it’s good okay and this whole idea that has to be high quality is such a 20th century idea and that idea just has to die it just has to go it’s going to go and if you want to have your feet planted firmly in blogging and in podcasting if you want to be a conduit for the ideas that flow out of this space you have to learn to stop insisting on the highest quality of production or a highest or the most beautiful voice the most malefluous voice the most sonorous voice the most beautiful voice you know listen to the last podcast that I did the Pisa podcast Pisa as in the leading power of Pisa which was a speech that I delivered I don’t even know if they actually ever listen to it I hope they did but it was done for a conference of technology users in Pisa Italy and I explained it’s 25 minutes it’s definitely worth listening to I ’d say listen to it all the way through because because the point is as we and I want to repeat myself is that creativity is so important creativity you know when you when your kid brings home a drawing from school that they created themselves that reflects some story that they want to tell you don’t call that crap right in fact it’s not hard to see the beauty in that that there’s a little human being there the new human being who is creating something and this is reflective of something inside of them that they’re that they’re wanting to communicate to you they’ve chosen to show this to you because they want you to understand this part of themselves they want you to see that they’re beautiful but they they are colorful that they see something that they have perhaps some difficulty explaining but if that if you ’ll just look more closely you ’ll see that it’s really very nice so you don’t hand it back to a child and say hey you know come back to me when you have all the production values down and when you know you hit all those cues when you ’re as good as Chris Leiden is you don’t hand that back to the child and say this crap where you don’t look at a classroom full of art produced by young people you know new people and say you know most of the art that’s created in kindergarten is crap we don’t do that we don’t do that because we love them because we love because we love them we we appreciate their struggle and we we makes it brings a tear to your eye to think about this beautiful new person who wants to say something now understand that I know this is kind of sloppy okay get it but it’s true it inside of all of us it’s still that little kindergartner who wants to say something beautiful maybe we don’t even know what it is but we love the idea of saying something that moves other people and that we’ve had this beaten out of us we’ve had this this idea that we’re that we’re good enough to do a painting we didn ’t need permission to do that when we were children we we believed in our ability to be creative when we were children nobody told us we had to be the best we knew that what we had to say was important so we said it nobody ever said that you had to be better than anybody in fact they taught us the opposite that just being yourself was good enough and it’s still true that’s my point it didn’t change nothing changed we just took some wrong turns we really went in the wrong direction in a lot of ways and thank God we get to correct that now we get to do it right and that means we have to stamp out these attitudes these attitudes that the people aren’t their creativity isn’t important because it’s everything it’s what we need to tap into to make this world work and you know Chris God bless you for stepping up to the plate again and you know I’m putting your heart into your work into what you do you’re an incredible teacher but you know what they say about teachers is that we always teach what we need to learn the most right so you know it we’re on this journey we’re all in it together and I think that’s the real message that’s the real lesson you know Marshall McLuhan said it the medium is the message so it’s still true it’s still it’s still really what we’re doing it still is it it still is what we do so you know my motto about this and about blog ging is come as you are we’re all just folks so that’s why I didn’t turn off the dishwasher before I started this and that’s why I left the roughness in there the stuff that’s likely to get me into total shitload of trouble you know even though I am a feminist even though I was raised in a feminist context even though I believe in everybody’s right to participate and I don’t think that it’s more important or less important that men or women or Jews or Gent iles or people with disabilities or young or old think that we want everybody’s gifts we want everybody to be part of what we’re if everything they want to be part of and so anyway that’s my podcast for the day it’s a it’s one it’s a 17 minute on going on 18 minute special my name is Dave Winer it’s Friday the 13 th one more thing to call out to Adam Curry who has got his pod show on Sirius is is debuting right now as we speak I wish I could listen to it I don’t have a serious satellite radio but you know I’m gonna be listening to the you know what everybody has to say about it good luck to you Adam knock him dead break a leg you know all the rest that shit and I don’t know boy okay everybody see y’all later bye this is Dave
I listened to Chris’s podcast.
I was walking north on the beach starting about a couple miles south of C rescent Beach in Florida. I was actually walking south not north sorry and on the way south I walked on the sand. The beach here is very wide and very flat and it was it wasn’t exactly low tide but it certainly wasn’t anything remotely close to high tide so there was lots and lots of sand and it’s flat and it’s not mushy sand it’s it’s sort of like it’s like walking on pavement so it ’s not really comfortable to walk barefoot so I wear these sandals rubber sandals and because you can also walk in the water with the rubber sandals which is kind of cool but they’re good for walking on the sort of hard pack sand which is much better than walking on the soft sand and the soft sand where it’s sort of like every step is a trudge and this isn’t like that this is like walking on a sidewalk it’s really comfortable and every so often you come to an inlet a little inlet in the sand where the water from the waves it’s sort of like a little tide pool and as the wave comes in the water comes up and it never fully goes all the way out and so you get your feet a little wet which is kind of refreshing the water this time of year already isn’t really very refreshing it’s already quite warm which makes for good swimming it’s not shocking although it kind of liked it when it was really cold a couple of months ago when the water was much colder and then when you go in swimming of course well it was kind of hard to get acclimated but when you came out your you felt like good to your bones it was so nice it’s a really nice sort of nice bony sort of nice feeling anyway so I walked a half an hour south and then I turned around and walked back and coming north it took me more than a half hour because because I walked a little more slowly because I walked in the water up to about my knees and points and of course as the waves would come in and we get deeper and as the waves would go out it would get more shallow and of course I enjoy that way of walking much more it’s and and on the way south I mostly listened to Jay Rosen and Lex from from Greensboro and on the way north Lisa Williams who I think stole the show she was the star she was talking about as always I mean I don’t just say that because I like to sort of you know I mean sometimes you feel weird about it because well you know it’s like people might think what you’re saying that because she’s a woman but Lisa and you know we try to be gender balanced in everything we do right and he can’t do it in the blog world it’s just it’s impossible there just aren’t enough women and so it’s you know it’s but I tell you Lisa is one of those there are like two kinds of women there sorry oh boy like an intro for this whatever see that that’s the problem is that women have a so intimidated they make all kinds of incredibly personal and deep statements about men like Halley suit talks about what it means to be an alpha male and and Shelly Powers talks about she makes my whole gender responsible for the sort of pigishness of one group of people who put on a put on conferences hey they exclude me too you know it’s not just they exclude women I find that places that exclude people generally I tend to get excluded you know I think it’ll make a lot of people uncomfortable part of it is because I’m like Jewish and there’s a lot of anti-semitism in the world and you know and it’s not considered a cause it’s not you don’t hear it people go go let’s be balanced you know ethnically balanced and I think a lot of the stuff that I was getting in Nashville honest goodness I think a lot of it was anti-semitism you should see some of the cartoons they drew I was shocked that they made me look like a rabbi and I don’t really look like a rabbi I mean I don’t think I do I’ve got a lot of like you know non-Jewish blood in me so you know well you know whatever I am Jewish though anyway I digress Lisa Williams is one of those women who never makes an issue out of she just but she belongs and she’s great and I’ve included her as the discussion leader at BligerCon and she was one of the regulars at Berkman Thursdays and she really she really did steal the show she has this sort of charm to her that is just you know it’s refreshing and then Doug K came on and Doug explained what podcasting was about and and then Ben Walker who Ben Ben doesn’t like me and I know that because he’s come out and said it quite a few times and and I think he doesn’t like me because I said some things that he didn’t like about public radio we had a you know whatever he asked me what I thought once he he said you’re actually he told me what I thought he said you like public radio because he gives you all this information and you know it keeps you informed and I raised my hand I said no no that’s not why I like public radio because I do like public radio and I said I like it because it’s relaxing and it’s true I mean I don’t really listen public radio very much now I don’t know why I can’t tell you why but it’s the truth but you know when I lived in Boston when I would be working I would keep public radio on all the time while I was doing you know technical work or writing work or whatever and I believe me if it weren’t relaxing I couldn’t if it were mentally and intellectually stimulating I couldn’t have it on while I was working and so Ben you know you gotta sort of trust me on that and so one of the things that I was evangelizing and one of the reasons Ben didn’t like me or if so I gathered was because I was you know an evangelist of podcast ing and although it wasn’t at the time called podcasting it is in every sense what eventually became to be known as podcast ing and it was kind of interesting I wanted Chris if Chris were sort of more and Chris is a friend of Ben’s and he said as much and and maybe this is why you don’t want friends interview and other friends because now one question I would have asked Ben had I been interviewing and was hey Ben am I okay now that you like podcasting because I mean Ben has the podcasting religion he really gets it he although I have to say that Chris could use a kick in the ass about podcasting which is why I picked up the microphone and decided to do this podcast today because Chris well I love you and I think you’re great and I really hope I expect your show is gonna be great the sooner you get this particular bug out of your butt the sooner your show is gonna go and soar to great new heights and the problem is this is that and I’m gonna project wildly here and I ’m gonna tell you why Chris has the attitude that he has and I could be way wrong but honestly I don’t think I am and Chris gotta know I hope you’re listening to this you gotta know that this is I’m in the spirit of of wanting to be helpful and and and to sort of like save you some time basically it this is what I think they’re a Chris is a radio professional and does a wonderful job of interviewing people and and his polish is you know second to none and you know their show you know they hit all the marks I don’t even know how they do it I mean you know it’s sort of like you know how to how does somebody make a website flow well well that I know how to do but how do you make a radio show flow the way Chris does it and Mary and whoever else is working on it you know maybe at some point I’ll be that way but it’s really actually not one of my goals you know I like doing a rough radio program I like doing a rough podcast which is what you’re listening to right now I like it rough I like it rough because as I’ve said so many times before is that when it’s too processed I’m suspicious that you know it’s my clue that the humanity has been sucked out of it and it’s that’s the nutrition you know that I get from it’s when it becomes soothing and relaxing but if it if it has a rough sort of miss to it a lack of production well you can’t listen to that in the background it’s sort of like hey this guy’s talking to me and you know it’s kind of distracting if somebody ’s talking to you while you’re trying to get some work done so so when a professional hears podcasts what do they snap to what’s there how do they you know what do they come on to oh well quality is really bad it’s really shit it ’s awful stuff most of its crap blah blah blah blah well no Chris it’s not crap somebody thinks it’s not crap somebody thinks it’s good okay and this whole idea that has to be high quality is such a 20th century idea and that idea just has to die it just has to go it’s going to go and if you want to have your feet planted firmly in blogging and in podcasting if you want to be a conduit for the ideas that flow out of this space you have to learn to stop insisting on the highest quality of production or a highest or the most beautiful voice the most malefluous voice the most sonorous voice the most beautiful voice you know listen to the last podcast that I did the Pisa podcast Pisa as in the leading power of Pisa which was a speech that I delivered I don’t even know if they actually ever listen to it I hope they did but it was done for a conference of technology users in Pisa Italy and I explained it’s 25 minutes it’s definitely worth listening to I ’d say listen to it all the way through because because the point is as we and I want to repeat myself is that creativity is so important creativity you know when you when your kid brings home a drawing from school that they created themselves that reflects some story that they want to tell you don’t call that crap right in fact it’s not hard to see the beauty in that that there’s a little human being there the new human being who is creating something and this is reflective of something inside of them that they’re that they’re wanting to communicate to you they’ve chosen to show this to you because they want you to understand this part of themselves they want you to see that they’re beautiful but they they are colorful that they see something that they have perhaps some difficulty explaining but if that if you ’ll just look more closely you ’ll see that it’s really very nice so you don’t hand it back to a child and say hey you know come back to me when you have all the production values down and when you know you hit all those cues when you ’re as good as Chris Leiden is you don’t hand that back to the child and say this crap where you don’t look at a classroom full of art produced by young people you know new people and say you know most of the art that’s created in kindergarten is crap we don’t do that we don’t do that because we love them because we love because we love them we we appreciate their struggle and we we makes it brings a tear to your eye to think about this beautiful new person who wants to say something now understand that I know this is kind of sloppy okay get it but it’s true it inside of all of us it’s still that little kindergartner who wants to say something beautiful maybe we don’t even know what it is but we love the idea of saying something that moves other people and that we’ve had this beaten out of us we’ve had this this idea that we’re that we’re good enough to do a painting we didn ’t need permission to do that when we were children we we believed in our ability to be creative when we were children nobody told us we had to be the best we knew that what we had to say was important so we said it nobody ever said that you had to be better than anybody in fact they taught us the opposite that just being yourself was good enough and it’s still true that’s my point it didn’t change nothing changed we just took some wrong turns we really went in the wrong direction in a lot of ways and thank God we get to correct that now we get to do it right and that means we have to stamp out these attitudes these attitudes that the people aren’t their creativity isn’t important because it’s everything it’s what we need to tap into to make this world work and you know Chris God bless you for stepping up to the plate again and you know I’m putting your heart into your work into what you do you’re an incredible teacher but you know what they say about teachers is that we always teach what we need to learn the most right so you know it we’re on this journey we’re all in it together and I think that’s the real message that’s the real lesson you know Marshall McLuhan said it the medium is the message so it’s still true it’s still it’s still really what we’re doing it still is it it still is what we do so you know my motto about this and about blog ging is come as you are we’re all just folks so that’s why I didn’t turn off the dishwasher before I started this and that’s why I left the roughness in there the stuff that’s likely to get me into total shitload of trouble you know even though I am a feminist even though I was raised in a feminist context even though I believe in everybody’s right to participate and I don’t think that it’s more important or less important that men or women or Jews or Gent iles or people with disabilities or young or old think that we want everybody’s gifts we want everybody to be part of what we’re if everything they want to be part of and so anyway that’s my podcast for the day it’s a it’s one it’s a 17 minute on going on 18 minute special my name is Dave Winer it’s Friday the 13 th one more thing to call out to Adam Curry who has got his pod show on Sirius is is debuting right now as we speak I wish I could listen to it I don’t have a serious satellite radio but you know I’m gonna be listening to the you know what everybody has to say about it good luck to you Adam knock him dead break a leg you know all the rest that shit and I don’t know boy okay everybody see y’all later bye this is Dave