What, exactly, are we doing here?

I’m Beau Kalden, and I love podcasts. But sometimes they’re too long - an hour, two hours, three hours. Sometimes I don’t want to listen to a couple of guys talk about a movie for three hours — I want to listen to one person talk about something interesting for 25-30 minutes.

And some podcasts are too shallow. I love Wikipedia.  Often I’ll find myself listening to an interesting podcast, and I’ll go to Wikipedia to learn more; come to find out, the hosts are just reading off Wikipedia verbatim. I could have just read it myself, it would be quicker.

I feel strongly that information should be free and widely available. I came up in the United States during a time where you could get information on just about every topic with just a little bit of effort. And not just information — you could get all the books, articles, music, films, and data you wanted. All you needed was a little savvy and a healthy skepticism of intellectual property law. But that is changing for the worse. Increasingly, many ideas are deemed unpopular, or subversive, or even immoral. Information about disfavored ideas gets suppressed. Communicating and discussing those ideas is discouraged. Personally, I believe it makes society worse off, and makes our lives emptier, to keep ideas away from people. I believe you should have the right to expose yourself to any ideas you want, so you can decide for yourself what to think.

Moreover, copyright law is out of control. I mean no disrespect or ill-will toward any writer, musician, or any kind of creative person who relies on copyright to protect their livelihood. Creating is hard work, and we all gotta eat. At the same time, global technological capitalism has made it risky, even dangerous, to communicate information without money changing hands. You defy copyright law at your peril - the algorithms will catch you, and you could easily face a ruinous civil lawsuit in federal court, regardless of your intentions. Yet that doesn’t stop AI companies and their limitless wealth from consuming everything while paying creators nothing.

The upshot of these trends is that people read less and think less. You can live your life however you want, but when I think about this, it bothers me.

So I started to do something about it.

First, I started collecting books. There are (currently) lots of places where you can get free electronic books. And I don’t mean renting from libraries, I mean downloading PDFs and EPUBs with no DRM, for one’s own personal archive, your own forever-library. (For the sake of this discussion, I’m talking about public-domain books.) Don’t count on these being available forever. There may not always be a time where you can get free, quality, reliable information from the internet. If this idea appeals to you, start today.

Then, I read some of those books. It turns out there’s a lot of stuff out there worth reading — even moldy old 19th century stuff. There’s a lot of good writing that is just enjoyable to read. And a lot of good information about all sorts of stuff. And, occasionally, a book can be well-written enough to interest you in a subject you didn’t care about before.  Not everything is worth your time, though — You have to skim to find the good stuff.

And I wanted to start spreading this information. I tried, like in Death Stranding, putting a bunch of ebooks on USB sticks, looped up on a lanyard, and giving them to people, telling them to make copies and then give me some of their own files.  That was fun but not sustainable. I had to think of a better way.

So I thought, why not just start a podcast? I can share the best bits from what I’ve read recently, and share the ideas I generated from reading it. Maybe other people will get their own ideas from it. The more ideas in circulation, the more dynamic our society becomes. Exercising your freedom to have your own thoughts, and communicate them freely, is good.

Public Domain & Fair Use

These are the two pillars of copyright law our podcast is built on. Anything in the public domain is fair game. (Determining what is in the public domain can be a little tricky in some cases, but for the most part, it just means something sufficiently old.) There’s a lot of writing out there in the public domain that is, in my opinion, worth your time and effort.

If it isn’t in the public domain, sharing it runs the risk of violating someone’s rights under copyright law. Nonetheless, fair use is the best excuse. (To say ‘defense’ would be more accurate than ‘excuse,’ but it doesn’t rhyme.) Sharing reasonably-sized portions of copyrighted texts, supported by commentary, for the purpose of stimulating discussion about that text in the public square, does not violate anyone’s rights.

At the end of the day, this little podcast reads short excerpts of interesting writing — that’s all it is and all it needs to be.