Colin Marshall

Vital stats:
Format: various segments, mostly interviews, on subjects like guns, cycles, rebels, and unemployment
Episode duration: ~1h
Frequency: monthly

Nearly a decade into the medium’s existence, quitting one’s first podcast and starting a second continues to produce intriguing results. It did for Caleb Bacon, whose The Gentlemen’s Club gave way to Man School. I like to think it did for yours truly, whose The Marketplace of Ideas gave way Notebook on Cities and Culture. And it seems to have for Edward Champion, a man even earlier into the podcast game, first known for The Bat Segundo Show. When he decided to put an end to that cultural interview program, he didn’t wait long to bounce back with Follow Your Ears, a podcast dealing not with individual guests, but with concepts: guns,cycles, aid, rebels, bullies, unemployment. (I’d have done lawyers, then guns, then money, but only out of personal preference.) Each of these episodes comprises not just an interview, but several different segments around the day’s theme. It reminded me, even when first I heard of it, of certain topical This American Life episodes, which appear whenever that show decides to ask questions about large-scale problems of war, politics, health, finance, what have you.

Despite having always done a solid job with those sorts of topics, This American Life never struck me as fully suited to that territory. (I found myself tuning in least often — or tuning out most often — in the stretch when they might as well have titled the show This American Foreign Policy.) Perhaps Follow Your Ears, seemingly born out of such an investigative nature, might offer a less awkward integration of forum, if you will, and substance. But This American Life operates, as I’ve heard major public radio programs tend to, with a staff and an office and legitimacy and everything. From what I can tell, Champion runs Follow Your Ears pretty much the way he ran Bat Segundo, as a one-man show. A tall order indeed, but you’ve got to respect the willing acceptance of that challenge, especially in podcasting. If I had to name one consistent source of disappointment during this five-and-a-half-year-long-and-almost-over tour of Podthinking duty, I’d point my finger straight at podcasters’ tendency to avoid challenge: to talk to people they already know, to talk about things they already know about, to fall into forms already familiar — to hang their proverbial pictures wherever they happen find the nails.

Read the whole thing at Maximum Fun.