Episode 30: What Even Is This Podcast?

At some point, someone imparted this piece of wisdom to me that you don't get to choose what you're remembered for.
For instance, if you're teaching a class or you're presenting on something or even if you're just having a conversation between two people, depending on what those people hear and what those people relate to and just what rings true and sits with them, different people, let's say it's a class teaching scenario.
Different people will walk away with different things they remember about that, different nuances.
Even if they get the same overall message, the specific things that you might be remembered for later could be very, very different from person to person.
If you think about this, if you think about people throughout your life that you remember very maybe pivotal messages from or just messages or something that you associate with a particular person, you might have taken different things away from that conversation than they might remember or that other people might remember.
And maybe you've had this experience, I know I have, where later I've gone back to them and said, hey, I remember when you said such and such.
And they look at me like, I don't even remember saying that.
So it's funny what people find rings true with them and what people find meaningful and then take with them through the rest of their life.
So this podcast is almost intentionally designed to be unsuccessful.
And what I mean, when I say that, it's because this podcast is not about a specific thing.
The internet content, business, industry, discipline, whatever, has become very pigeonholing.
Pigeonholing? Pigeonholing? I guess that's a word.
You have to, all the advice, if you want to build an audience for yourself, all the advice tends to be about, well, find a niche and just drill as hard into that niche as possible.
Because people looking for that particular niche will find you and use you for advice and get used to it.
And you become the authority on a thing.
This podcast is the opposite of all of that.
And it's probably just my nature.
I can't, I can't help it.
I just, I'm so contrarian.
And I just have to always play devil's advocate.
And that's, that's my own personal flaws.
But this podcast is the opposite.
This podcast is about trying to expand horizons.
And I'm not saying that I, I'm some, you know, like Buddha, Buddhist monk figure or something that, you know, has this huge array of, you know, all the life experience in the world.
And I can just, just, you know, impart wisdom to people or something that, that, that's not my point here.
My point is that I do have a set of experiences like any person does.
And many of those experiences are very, and interests, experiences, interests, hobbies, many of the things that I think about day to day are very disjointed and different from one another.
And I suspect that I'm not the only one, that people are not just single purpose, specific, drive into only one thing people.
I think there is room in this world to have many interests.
And so I started this to, for a few reasons, but in part to talk about things like that, to talk about interests and things that I think about and things that I've found meaningful through my life.
In hopes that some number of people might be drawn to that, and it might, certain pieces might hook them.
And it might not even be the things that I, as I was saying in the beginning, it might not even be the things that I'm necessarily specifically trying to impart.
But maybe by sharing various experiences and various interests and various thought patterns, different people will take different things away and, and, and broaden a little bit.
And I know I look for that in relationships that I have through life.
I like to hear the stories people have and the interests that they have.
That means something to me because I believe it also helps me expand my horizons in life.
So what's with the name?
Late morning coffee.
This is a meaningful phrase to me.
When I was in grad school, there was a period of time that I remember very fondly.
I wasn't yet working full time.
I was mostly going to school.
I was doing some contract work for a little bit of money on the side.
But I would get up, I got into this pattern where I would get up in the morning and I'd get up kind of late in the morning, you know, whatever, 9.30, sometimes 10 o'clock.
It was more of a night owl.
I'd go and I'd get some breakfast and I'd go and I'd get a cup of coffee.
And I'd bring my cup of coffee home to an apartment that I lived in.
And at that time, I had kind of just discovered RSS feeds.
If you don't know what that is, I'll leave that to your own exploration.
But there was an RSS feed for TED Talk videos.
I think it was fairly new at the time.
I think they had just started to really distribute videos of certain presentations.
There weren't that many of them.
It was kind of at a clip of about one a day.
So I would, in the late morning, have my coffee and watch whatever the TED Talk of the day was.
Now, the point of this isn't necessarily just promoting TED Talks.
But the point I am trying to get across is that it was a way to broaden and expand horizons.
And TED Talks vary greatly.
They vary in content.
They vary in quality.
They vary in topic.
They vary in presentation style.
Some of these, and some of them really struck true with me.
And some of them, I really was kind of bored through or didn't get.
But the point was, every day I spent about 10 or 15 minutes on whatever the topic was that it brought me that day.
And I really loved this ritual.
And I missed this through the years.
Because life gets busy.
And you don't necessarily have time to do that sort of thing.
So what this podcast was about for me, or the name was about for me, was capturing that.
Capturing this idea of what's more relaxing and what's a better time to kind of enrich yourself or expand your worldview or however you want to look at it.
What's a better time than in the late morning over a cup of coffee?
So that's what it means to me.
This podcast also, to some extent, is, and this wasn't the primary thing, but I think just as a aside.
You know, should anything ever happen to me, I have kids, and maybe this would be a useful or comforting or an interesting kind of record.
Because they're young still, and I don't necessarily talk to them about all or many of the things that I talk about here.
But maybe it would be nice, you know.
And not that I'm sitting around worried about dying or something.
But you just never know what could happen.
And it might be nice to have a record of that sort of thing.
And I'm not much of a journaler or a writer.
Or, I just, I mean, I can write, I think I can write fairly well, but I don't go out of my way to do it.
Whereas this is more of a medium that's comfortable to me.
And I think the voice aspect of it probably could be very useful as well.
I don't know.
So anyway, that's really what this podcast is about to me.
It's about not trying to impart wisdom necessarily to people, but to tell stories and share experiences and share thoughts in hopes that other people might be inspired to do the same.
And I think that's a big piece of it is it's not just me, again, trying to impart things on others.
It's more about trying to set some inspiration, I suppose, for other people to also do this on their behalf with their different experiences and their different thoughts.
I think that the world has become such an echo chamber where all you ever hear and see and do are things that you know and things that you're comfortable with and things that you believe.
And sometimes it's good to hear and see and experience other stuff too.
So that's what this is about.
I hope that for those of you who have listened this far or just picking it up now or whatever, that there are opportunities that you have to enjoy a late morning cup of coffee and expand your horizons and think about some new stuff.
And, you know, for me, this is right on cue explaining what a podcast is about at episode 30.
But, yeah, I just kind of hope that people enjoy it, enjoy a little bit of stories and a little bit of relaxing, different worldview from your own.