A Viral Start

I don’t think the year 2020 isn’t going exactly as planned for anyone. I suspect this will be one of those years remembered with notoriety, like 1929, 2001, etc. One plan I have stuck to, however, was recording my first podcast.

At the beginning of the year my weekly create output goals were to either publish a 500ish word essay, as I have been doing, or publish a podcast. Today will be the first day I’m publishing a podcast episode.

I have partnered up with my brilliant friend Amanda Cassatt for this podcast; it was her idea that we should pair up for this creative project. People love listening to the two of us talk IRL. I think it’s fair to say that we’re both fairly independent thinkers and I appreciate our intellectual chemistry.

The working name for our podcast is The New Normal with Amanda and Prashant. We would have just called it “The New Normal,” but there are other podcasts named that. We’ll see if this sticks. These are definitely the times of a new normal, and I feel to a great extent that we are the new normal.

I’m applying the Google philosophy of shipping a working beta to the production of this podcast. Neither of us are pros, we just bought our first real microphones, and I edited this podcast myself using free software. We’ll get fancier and learn as we go, but I hope whoever stumbles upon this enjoys this raw, no frills take.

In our first episode, we talk about COVID-19. It’s not quite the virality we wanted to frame our first recording, but it’s clearly on all of our minds. I have yet to figure out how to embed the Anchor player into Medium if that is possible at all, so here’s a link to the pod.