The Happy Journey of Listening, Learning, and Creating Something Meaningful
We’re three friends who aspire to contribute to the bigger picture. We want to listen to others and be listened to ourselves. We want to create things and we want to learn about things people are creating.
This is the first episode of a journey we set out on together. A journey to dig into the itch to create meaningful stuff. On the way, we unexpectedly discovered meaning in unpacking the wonderful things other people are creating.
In this first episode, we reflect on why we started making this podcast and what each of us got out of the first season of conversations. We also take some time to prepare you for what’s ahead, who we’ll be interviewing, and hint at the bumps and bruises you’ll get the witness us go through.
Who are we exactly?
Jake Smeester is a husband and father who spends his days as a content creator at AWS building out new programs for worldwide sales enablement (including gobs of podcasts).
Ryan Findley is a husband and father who spends his days running the product team at Learn to Win.
Ryan Holdeman is neither a husband nor a father. He spends his days helping personal growth businesses leverage technology.
Join us as we explore.
You can find the transcript for this episode here. Find transcripts for all episodes here.
Question of the Day
What’s the itch you’ve been needing to scratch? Do you have a podcast you’ve been dying to create? If you do, please share in the comments what you’d call it and what it would be about.
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Links From the Episode
Arrested Development (tv series)
Music by Hygge – “Quarantrap“. Please follow her on SoundCloud
Books
In this first episode we didn’t touch on book recommendations, but in our interviews, we ask guests for recommendations. You’ll see those here. A favorite of Ryan Holdeman:
Life in Half a Second: A great book about making things with haste that will last beyond you
Show Highlights
[2:09] How it took us *a year* to record Episode 1
[4:02] Why Jake wanted to do this in the first place
[6:07] How it started as one thing and ended up as another
[7:46] The Secret Name of the Show
[9:53] Why Holdeman joined Jake’s Show (and why he loves watching Fin eat tacos while recording)
[12:06] Why Fin joined Jake’s Show (beyond eating tacos)
[13:49] Why Jake joined Jake’s Show and what he’s been learning along the journey
[19:23] Why “The Interesting Lives of Normal People”?
[28:45] How we (Holdeman) made the logo
[33:16] What to expect from Season 1
The Interesting Lives of Normal People is a regular conversation with someone interesting. Our job is to ask good questions with a belief that on the other side of being asked good questions, everyone has a great story we can learn from.
