Posts Tagged → land conservation
Podcasting’s dark side
The other reason I do not have a podcast, is that podcasting has a dark side. And while I may have an occasional “dark side” myself, I neither need any new ones nor do I want this particular extra one added to my already cumbersome burden.
Here’s the thing about podcasting: To succeed, you must devote yourself brilliantly, daily, and even then chase clicks. Most of us are not brilliant, nor can we afford to quit our day job to fully implement a podcast, and so that leaves just the click chasing. Or, as many podcasters who now have opened up a clear view into their own dark side, as is pretty commonly called, they/ you / the aspiring podcaster becomes a “click whore.”
In other words, to aggregate as many internet “clicks” as possible, a podcaster must throw a pretty wide net. This wide net requires the aspiring click whore to essentially bite the heads off of chickens, live (the podcaster, not the chicken, which becomes dead), on air. Yes, the old freak show stunt of biting a head off of a live chicken is perhaps just a teensy exaggeration here, but it is a sad fact that in order to attract and hold viewers, the successful podcaster must really stand out in a crowd. Daily.
As Jim Seif, the former secretary of PA DEP, said in a hearing back in 1998, after taking the podium from the sixth speaker before him, “I feel like Zsa Zsa Gabor’s seventh husband. I know what to do, I am just not sure I know how to make it exciting.”
Great line, and I have used it several times myself, including on September 11, 2001, when I had just begun giving testimony in a Pennsylvania House hearing on land conservation. Moments later the 9/11 jihadi terror planes began crashing in NYC and DC and Flight 93 hit in rural PA, and everyone in the room was spared my own attempt to make the same warmed over fare seem appetizing, if not exciting. We were evacuated from the PA Capitol as I was in mid speech. Oh, my fortunate audience…
Anyhow, podcasters who have survived six months at it know that they must make the mundane seem exciting, or they must begin breaking taboos and saying naughty no-no things. All of it exciting, yes, until all those live chicken heads inside their stomach begin pecking away, trying to get out. The pressure to perform well enough to draw an audience every day results in some podcasters making nutty claims, and then doing mental backflips and wild leaps of logic to try and keep the whole dog and pony show going. They go nuts.
This dynamic is what destroyed Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens’ podcast careers, and Nick Fuentes has the rest of the same type of podcast listeners, who must also do hits of meth and huffing spray paint while nodding along with whatever repetitive thing he is saying that day.
As a podcaster, you will always find an audience, and some audiences are made of either really bored or simplistic individuals. Many podcasters have an audience of fifty, some get to fifty thousand. To get beyond that number, and thus begin to get enough clicks to make a living, well, you gotta be like Zsa Zsa Gabor’s seventh husband and perform like a porn star, every night.
Most normal people cannot or will not do this. I am not normal, but neither will I attempt to bend myself into a pretzel shape in order to chase clicks.
Oh, the irony that the ideologically rich and fabulously diverse ecosystem of podcastistan is ruled by such a hard iron rule! Would it not be somewhat of a relief to be a mainstream media personality, and have an incurious audience, or a dumb audience, or, in the case of CNN, almost no audience? So much easier!
This is the life of, say, George Stephanopoulos at ABC. He is an openly politically partisan activist, masquerading as a “news reporter.” He is not a fair-minded arbiter of accuracy or facts, and his audience would fade away were he to become such a person. No chicken head biting or dog and pony show for George Stephanopoulos. Just rote activism, day in and day out. Same boring narrative (“Donald Trump bad, Democrats good“), every day.
But it was this very vacuousness that created podcastistan!
It was the ABC News / mainstream media’s failure to address real substance, or to use accuracy and real facts, and its nonstop political partisanship, that drove thinking Americans away from the legacy media outlets in the first place! And it is this market failure of the mainstream media that is causing parent companies to turn over, say, CBS, to new editors, in the hope of breathing new life into the dead body.
See? There is no easy answer to this podcast thing. To jump into it, you must have something of value to say and the ability to say it in an engaging way. To get an initial audience started and then held, you have to hit the ground running hard. And to then maintain and grow your audience, you must have greatly incisive wit and glowing personality, as well as either a whole roost of chickens or a three ring circus full of dogs and ponies.
Yes, podcasters are better people than the George Stephanopolusususes of the world, but eventually the line between them can become thin, if one is not careful. Or one can become dark, and break taboos, and say naughty no-no things that hurt people, because stimulating a particular audience’s otherwise hidden sadism streak is all ya got left.
So no, no podcasting for ol’ Josh. Nope. None of it is appealing to me, though I do enjoy listening to some podcasts, here and there.
Thanks for being here and listening!
Obama kicks land conservation in the n*ts
Despite having spent my career in environmental protection, conservation, and especially land conservation, I am always non-plussed when someone waves a magic wand, declares some government-managed public land off-limits, and then calls it “conservation.”
I love land acquisitions for public parks, forests, and hunting areas. Adding to the existing roster of public lands gives us more flexibility with existing areas, more chances to explore multiple use.
In the past couple of weeks lame duck president Hussein Obama has waved a magic executive wand over millions of acres of federally managed lands out west, and declared them national monuments. Obama did not work with land trusts or ranchers to purchase conservation easements or fee simple land out west, thereby adding to the total acreage available for public use. No, instead, Obama did there what he has basically done in the Middle East.
He dropped a turd in the punch bowl, and left the party.
Except Obama is so arrogant, he claims it is a big success.
Nothing damages land conservation more than unilateral actions by Washington, DC, about resource-rich lands specifically purchased to support and benefit the American people. All of them. The magic wand executive-heavy procedure just alienates so many people, you have to wonder if it is by design.
After all, recall that under Obama, the IRS made war on land trusts and conservancies. Silly rules and regulations were enacted making land purchases and tax-exempt gifts and appraisals much more difficult to do across America. My own belief is Obama hates most Americans, and especially people with land, whom he equates to colonists of some sort. So he set out to punish them. All those rich land trusts run by wealthy white people…mmm mmm mmmmmm, no good. Waaaayyy too much “privilege.”
And so as much as Obama is giving a black eye to real land conservation, he is actually doing this to hurt the people he mistakenly equates with the racist notion of “white privilege.”
He is also doing what he did best, which is rule by fiat, like the tyrant he wanted to be and like those he relates to best elsewhere, like Cuba, and Saudi Arabia. Waving the executive magic wand is ruling by fiat. In this day and age, every acre of federally managed land out west has some political land mine under it. You only start kicking it around if you want to stir things up. What a coward and home wrecker he is to stir it up and walk away.
I think Obama enjoyed kicking land conservation in the n*ts. Regardless of the damage it does to land trusts and valuable land conservation programs down the road. It is part of his scorched earth legacy as he leaves the White House.