In April 2020, the world had been shut down. This statement might sound weirdly apocalyptic to someone who hasn’t experienced those 2 years but thankfully, we made it through. Those years helped a lot of people take a pause from their super busy lives and explore hobbies and interests. I discovered pockets of time where I could do more brain work. For example, cooking – I had to be physically present but my brain wanted to do more. That’s when I discovered the world of podcasts and became a podcast learner.
One of the first things I picked up on podcast was learning more about the history of Ancient Egypt. After our visit to Egypt in 2019 (which I have covered in detail in earlier blogs), I was fascinated by the level of planning and attention-to-detail that ancient Egyptians had – creating things that survived for more than 3000 years. I went on the Google Podcast app and started listening to the History of Egypt podcast. I loved the story telling and how the episodes were structured and got hooked.
It had become a daily routine – wake up, finish off the morning hygiene routine and get into the kitchen to prepare the meals for the day (yup, this was a daily activity during Covid and something I miss now). In the kitchen, on the window sill, I would prop up my phone and switch on to the next episode of the podcast.
Over the next few weeks, I saw the construction of the very first pyramid by Djoser, the Great Pyramid of Giza by Khufu and the remaining pharaohs of the Old Kingdom. This collapsed into the First Intermediate Period where Egypt was split again. By this time, we had figured out how to make good gravies for our curries instead of the watery gravy that we used to make earlier.
After a lot of struggle, Mentuhotep II reunified the kingdoms to usher in the Middle Kingdom. We were starting to get our sabudana khichdi right by now – it was no longer a sticky mess and the flavours were just perfect! There was a lot of progress on both ends – cooking and Egyptian history.
I decided to look up the person who was running this podcast – Dominic Perry. He was a PhD in Egyptology and doing the podcast in between his studies. I went through his website and noticed that quite a few of the audio links were broken. Since I had a blog myself, I knew how difficult it was to go back and correct basic stuff in earlier pages.
So, using a bit of Excel and data cleaning, I managed to correct all the links and put them on a sheet in under an hour. I found his email ID and sent it out to him. To my surprise, he actually saw my mail and responded! In fact, he was so grateful for it that he offered me a paid gig! This was totally unexpected and I was pleasantly surprised. We had a couple of video calls and he explained the challenges he was facing on his website and podcast content.
I picked up a few of the projects that he offered and optimized a lot of his site pages and podcasts. Very basic stuff but I enjoyed it because I was contributing to a podcast that I enjoyed listening to. Thus, I went from podcast learner to podcast contributor.
I was fascinated by the power of the internet and how interconnected the entire world was. I could easily reach out to a person sitting in New Zealand and collaborate with him! While this is not a new fact, experiencing it first-hand gave me goosebumps.
I continued listening to the podcast religiously for almost 2 years. In late 2021, two things changed – the world started opening up and my son was born. So, the daily routine changed – along with the daily cooking, the podcasts also went out.
In the current routine, I have a wasteful drive to the office which takes about 1.5 hours each way (ya, it’s mad, I know!). I used to be super annoyed with the commute and decided to go back to podcasts to make better use of that time. Thanks to a friend, I found Kanan Gill’s No New Notifications (NNN). It is a super funny podcast (no surprises, since it is Kanan Gill!) and made the drive bearable. Sadly, my drives were so long that I ended up finishing multiple episodes in one go and completed the whole thing really quickly. Thanks to NNN, I was able to shift my “miserable driver” mindset to “indifferent driver” – that works a lot better for me.
Then, I got into a phase of “learning more about fitness and well being”. I discovered the Huberman Lab podcast and gave it a shot. It was exactly the kind of content I was looking for – science but combined with practical inputs. On the plus side, thanks to the infinitely long episodes, I can only finish one episode over 1-2 office trips. So I’ll never run out of content to listen to (assuming I continue to find his content useful). I’ll probably write another blog with all the things I’ve learnt and applied to my life from the Huberman lab podcast – peak podcast learner moment.
After 3 years of being a podcast learner and listener, I am now a podcast creator too! I have a series ongoing where we explore the life of my grandmother. It is completely in Malayalam and is called “Ende Katha”. In each episode, we ask questions to my grandmother about her experience growing up and various phases of her life. We learn something new every episode and it is fascinating to hear about life in the 1960s and 1970s. I record and edit the audio, my sis helps me with AI generated images to go along with the conversation and I edit the final video before uploading it. Do check it out – it’s only on Youtube.
That kinda summarises my experience with podcasts so far. It’s been a fun journey that has opened up some doors and helped me grow as a person. Are you a podcast learner too? Let me know which podcasts have had an impact on you in the comments below. I’ll check them out on my next drive to the office. See you on the next blog!
Check out my entire list of blogs in my archive page, The Pensieve.
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