The Sustainable Podcast

This past summer me and my good friend and colleague from the Technology Governance and Sustainability programme - Max Peacock - spent five days in an underground recording studio at TalTech discussing everything from AI to education and gaming:

I had an absolute blast and Max is one of the most well spoken, clear-headed people I have ever met. Talking to smart, young critical thinkers like him gives me great hope for the future.

I don't know how I feel about the podcast format in general though. Most of them are just people voicing their opinions so in the end I'm not sure what their long term educational value is. For me personally, they're almost more fun to create than to consume. They're hard to index, take up more space and bandwidth, don't make for great reference material and people usually "listen" to (more like hear) them while doing something else so the whole thing seems more like a form of ephemeral enternainment or background noise. In other words, radio.

I also wonder how much their popularity detracts from writing which is still the superior medium for intellectual discussion. Or how many articles will be left unread just because there's a podcast episode about that topic somewhere and what long-term effects all of this will have on literacy.

But it's been interesting to follow their resurgence. I was really into podcasts in around 2005 with shows like TWiT and FLOSS Weekly and I remember subscribing to some really niche ones about Cocoa development. Carrying them around on an iPod really felt like tuning into a radio station dedicated just for your specific kinks. And then a lot of them just kind of disappeared and I lost interest. And now it seems they're all the rage.

A big thanks to Max, my co-host and editor and TalTech for providing us with the facilities.