It feels like an era since I last came back here, and it has been. I’m sorry I haven’t been present, but a lot of stuff happened: I went to Japan, I got so much more serious about YouTube, I got a lot faster, and I guess I got caught up in a whole lot of different ways. Which in retrospect maybe I should have integrated a little better with my schedule, but well it is what it is, and here we are today.

Tomorrow I’m going to be talking a little bit about why I got into podcasting, and here I am, writing this little post to think about what the reasons really are.

Let me list them.

1. Understanding the world around me.
   
   Making podcasts and videos isn’t just about creating a video and sharing it to the world. It’s also about trying to understand the world around you on a level that’s deeper than what people around you would normally accomplish – which means learning and reading. That’s always come naturally to me. So for me, this is really just a way that my routine kind of plays out as my nature brings itself out into the world.
   
2. Having some control over my environment and the people who listen to me.
   
   When I talk about things, it helps me renew my thoughts, and it gives me the sense that I’m constantly talking to real people with their own thoughts, their own feelings, their own dreams, their own desires. Somehow podcasting just makes it feel a little bit like I’m able to shape the way that the people around me think and change a little bit about how the world around me operates or is run. Whether it’s by the chance view from a politician, a policymaker, the masses on the street, or the dozens who end up commenting on Facebook, it gives me pleasure to just feel that somehow they’ll listen to me and end up going in the direction that I believe is correct or right.
   
3. Receiving validation from the people around me.
   
   It’s nice to feel like the people around you care about what you think, who you are as a person, what your preferences are. It’s also nice if they’re not strangers but actually real people around you. Content creation does that to some degree, even if it’s imperfect.
   
4. Expressing my voice.
   
   Talking out loud is basically just using your instrument in a way that you know that other people are going to hear you, regardless of the way you express yourself. It means also that you’re constantly on a stage and that you’re learning how to come up with the things that make sense in the moment and bringing them out into the world, casting broadly your net upon the world.
   
5. Getting better.
   
   Learning how to express yourself is a skill – there’s no two ways about it. The way that you think, the way that you express yourself, all of those are things that you can actually get better at, whether it’s how you structure your thoughts or how you take in knowledge and information to create something that you can share with the world. For me, I think that’s meaningful and I think it’s beautiful to think about how to better connect with people, to appreciate the mind, psychology, and so many other things on that journey of learning to show yourself to the world.
   
6. Building a career.
   
   Creating content allows you to meet lots of people and it also allows you to make a living through the person that you are, the way you think, how you grow with and confront the world. For me, I think that’s the very best thing that you could possibly do because you’re just constantly learning how to make your personality come out in that day-to-day experience of just talking to a camera, improving and doing things along the way – I also really enjoy this constant feeling that I’m getting better at speaking and thinking, so for me, I think that’s really cool and something that I want to keep on doing until I learn how to master it.
   
7. Becoming me.
   
   It’s always felt like learning to express myself and to understand different parts of my consciousness has been part of this journey of becoming me.
   
   I’m sure that a lot of people find themselves in quiet spaces in the deeper contemplations. But for me, somehow or another, becoming me has always been tied to learning how to express different parts of myself, to learn how to play this vocal instrument, to use this brain that God gave me to bring down the realizations that somehow I had gotten from the deeper parts of myself, delivering them into the world and transmuting them into my very core and being.
   
   Somehow it feels like whenever I speak, think, and talk, I am becoming a little more of me, even if I know that this is all temporary and it will all fade away.
   
   Somehow, there is a sense in my mind that through bringing all of this out, I mattered, it mattered, and it will go on into eternity as an echo and imprint of who I was, who I am, and who I will be in the future.

All right, all that was probably a little prosaic, but it was helpful for me to get that out and to think about things. I promise to write a little more soon and catch you all later.