4 Big Guys Audio

[Annette Fazzari]

Peopleare generally pretty good at doing the right thing. The blameless retrospective exists for a very good reason, and blaming individuals is rarely productive when trying to solve problems. I would highly recommend this video that talks about how and why systems and procedures fail.

But the blame game is pointless. Games are hugely complex. And working under pressure, forced to take shortcuts - like it seems happened with Darktide what with its release - can leave countless long-lasting problems that dramatically affect everything down the line. Stuff like that is rarely even up to the devs themselves. Everyone there is no doubt very good at their job and trying their best.

Rushed Work. Also Audio Engineering in a virtual world is not the same as just mixing plain audio per se. You can easily make more layers in a game WHEN a sound cue plays for example trapper is near you at 30 m play the sound player is 7m (range is somewhat 5 to shoot) play a sound before.

From that point you can start doing priority Sound cues Trapper - Bomber - Dog - Flamer - Bomber then you could most likely fine tune WHEN EACH of those play their SFX. They could make a rule they always make a sound as of now theoretically. OR make a system if xyz meets this distance to the player play a sound. This would theoretically not overload the system and make such issues as we have at the moment.

We discussed the power of audio to capture curiosities and foster imagination, how Tinkercast is doing that in and out of the classroom, and how it can help re-engage students in building needed skills at a critical time. Enjoy!

Welcome to The Future of Education, where we are dedicated to building a world in which all individuals can build their passions, fulfill their human potential, and live a life of purpose. To help us think about those topics today, I'm really thrilled we have Guy Raz, who is widely considered one of the pioneers of podcasting. Many of you are, I'm sure, familiar with his podcasts, whether it's, How I Built This, the kids science podcast, Wow in the World, TED Radio Hour, many more, we're going to get into all of that. Guy's also a bestselling author, and he's the co-founder of two media companies, including Built It Productions and the kids and family studio, Tinkercast, which we're going to talk about today on the show. Guy, just thank you so much for being here. I confess I'm fanboy-ing a little bit at the moment, but I'm just thrilled that you're here.

Michael, thank you for having me on and for being a fan. That's why I do what I do because, and we can talk about this a bit later, but every show, whether it's How I Built This, or Wow in the World, or The Great Creators, is I make it in the hopes that people get joy from it and value from it. So, when I meet somebody who says they're a fan, by all means, please. I mean, it means a lot to me, and I really love it and appreciate it, because most of the time, most of the week I am in this studio behind this microphone isolated from the world. I don't actually physically interact with people who are fans very often. So, thank you for saying that.

You generally get to ask the questions, so this is a little bit of a role reversal. But I want to start there on the personal side, where you just gave us that quick entry into... Because as I said, you host a lot of podcasts. I don't think I can keep count, I don't know if you can. But I'd love you just to tell your story, because I actually don't think a lot of people hear that around how you got your start in podcasting, the shows that you're hosting now, and selfishly how you stay on top of all the work it takes to do these podcasts so well with this level of excellence.

Yeah. I started in podcasting when it was a backwater, back in 2011. At the time, I was at NPR, I had been at NPR since the beginning of my career as a reporter at NPR. I was a reporter at CNN. Most of my early career I was a war correspondent. I covered the Iraq War, I covered Israel, Palestine. I was in Gaza, I was in the West Bank, I was in Tel Aviv, I was all over the Middle East. I covered the Iraq War and Macedonia and Pakistan. I mean, that was my life. I was in and out of war zones for most of my career. I covered the military and the Pentagon, which is for many people who know How I Built This and don't know my background would be strange to imagine, but that really was my life. I was living in hotels wearing bulletproof vests, I still have them, dodging bullets and explosions, and that was my life before I had a family.

Eventually, I was a host on All Things Considered at NPR for a few years. I would say around 2011, I started to get a little bit disillusioned with news. It felt to me like the thing that I wanted to do with my life, which was to have an impact in some way, I didn't feel like I was having the right kind of impact. I didn't feel like... By going out in the world and trying to tell stories, the hope is that you will give people information that will help them build a more nuanced view of the world. But what I discovered, and it was a very naive perspective, what I discovered is that we humans generally don't operate that way. So, I wanted to figure out a different way to have an impact.

What I landed on was that news wasn't the thing that I wanted to do anymore. So, around 2011, I started to transition out, and I ended up connecting with people at TED, the TED Talks people, and they were looking to build a podcast, build on a podcast that they had started but didn't really land in the way that they had hoped. So, they asked me to basically build a show, rebuild a show, and it was called the TED Radio Hour, and I launched that in 2012. This was a backwater era in podcasting. I mean, there were relatively few podcasts, comparatively few people listening. I had gone from being in All Things Considered, with an audience of five million people to a show with a few thousand.

Fast-forward, about a year, two years in, there was a podcast called Serial, and that exploded in our culture. All of a sudden, a lot of people started to discover podcasts, including TED Radio Hour, at the time which was a show about big ideas. I would interview TED... People who gave TED talks. The shows were arranged thematically, so we would talk about creativity or curiosity or how we organize our lives or the vastness of outer space. It was this interdisciplinary show where you would have, in one episode, you would literally have Sting, like a rock star, Sting, and then a neuroscientist from Johns Hopkins, and then a former prisoner and an Arctic explorer in the same episode, talking about a broadly connected theme. That show gave me an opportunity to really explore ideas.

What I realized having done that, doing that show, was that it was connecting with people in a different way. So, when I was a news reporter in Iraq or Afghanistan or the West Bank or wherever I was, I didn't get the sense that I was connecting with people in a way that was making their lives better. But all of a sudden making this show, that changed all of that, because the feedback that I was getting from listeners was, "Wow. This has changed my day," or, "It's given me a different perspective on the world." Or, "Now when I look up at the stars, I realize I'm looking at the past in real time." So, that experience really launched my career in podcasting. I eventually started my own production company, called Built It Productions, and started another show called, How I Built This, which I continue to do today, which is about entrepreneurs, founders of companies.

Then around the same time, with a very good friend, Mindy Thomas, started a podcast called, Wow in the World, which we launched in 2017. Along with another friend, Meredith Halpern-Ranzer, we started a kids production company. So, that was really the beginning of my career. Since that time, I continue to do, How I Built This. I no longer do TED Radio Hour. That was an NPR TED show, so eventually I stopped doing that. But it was a wonderful experience. Today I host, How I Built This and Wow in the World. I do a show called The Great Creators, where I interview celebrities, musicians and actors, Tom Hanks, Stephen Colbert, Jason Sudeikis, Jeff Tweedy, Bjork, a long list of people, about their lives, about their creative process, about their failures. I try and create a space for them to show a more relatable side of who they are. Because whether you're an actor or the founder of Starbucks or me or you, we are all characters at certain points of the day or the week or the month.

What I try to do on all of my shows, my interview shows, is to show a more stripped down side of people, the side of people that people might... The part of us that we might see in the mirror. I try and show that to my listeners so they understand that, many of the people they listen to and admire are like them in very many ways. So, my hope is that when somebody hears a founder on How I Built This talk about how they built Instagram or Starbucks or Tate's Cookies or whatever brand that we do, that they can see that there's a possibility there. That if it's something that they want to do, if there's an aspiration they have, they can hear and feel that through the shows that I'm part of, that I make, in the hopes that they walk away from it feeling empowered and inspired and maybe even changed a little bit.

It's fascinating to hear you say that, because inspired is the word that I wrote down as you were talking. It seems like you really help lift people up to believe that they could go chase that dream. In fact, as I said, I first got to know your podcast through, How I Built This. My wife, when she was starting her company, she made all the employees in the kitchen listen to it during food prep and things of that nature. But then obviously you really got into my radar with, Wow in the World, with Mindy. I, for a while was like, "Are you sure it's the same person doing both of these things? Are you really sure?" But I guess that's one thing that you were doing in both cases, which is inspiring and lifting us up to realize what is possible. But how did you see the through line from this podcast world that's largely for adults, entrepreneurs, to kids? Those on the surface feel like very different audiences and very different shticks.

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