What’s the next logical thing to do after launching a weekly podcast? Launch another one, of course! It’s called The Candy Factory 5BY5 Podcast, a fun show where my co-host, Diggs, and I welcome a special guest to have a five, five minute conversations, about five random topics.
Where do the topics come from? Diggs and I and enter them into an iPhone app whenever we feel inspired. They can literally be anything from a general theme like “traffic” to a specific thing like “Star Wars” or “the NFL”. When we record the episode, the app is accessed on an iPad and presents us with the topics counting down five minutes for each topic. We literally don’t know what we’re going to be talking about and the show is recorded “live to tape”, meaning there are no post production edits.
Check out the first episode below, where we welcome Melody Leon from Blush Beautiful or subscribe on Apple Podcasts (more coming soon).
Here’s a little more backstory if you don’t have anything else going on and want to keep reading…
About a year ago I started thinking how badly I needed 2019 to be a year of action. I needed to get back to making music and media. I called it the…Year of Action (cause that’s how I roll). It certainly has been a year filled with all kinds of action, but all of that is a story for another post. For this post, the focus is on podcasting, something that has been near and dear to me for almost 10 years.
In 2018, I managed to squeeze out six episodes of the audio collage (and somewhat experimental) Erase the Filter podcast but I struggled to find a good rhythm with it. ETF will definitely be back, but in the meantime I needed something a little more tangible and a little less abstract, so in September I launched DO.ERS, a podcast that showcases innovators, creators, and entrepreneurs in my home town of Lancaster and the Central PA region. I record and produce the show at The Candy Factory, the coworking space where I spend my days making software. As of this writing I’m 13 episodes in for DO.ERS.
My friend, Robert Diggs (or just Diggs), is a member of The Candy Factory, and someone who I’ve really enjoyed getting to know over the past year. He’s a native of New York City who ended up in Lancaster to attend Franklin and Marshall College, and stuck around after graduation, starting his career and administrative academia work and becoming an integral part of Lancaster Transplant, a local business that helps people who are new to the area feel welcome. Over the past year Diggs and I would get into these conversations where we would just riff on random stuff and one day we thought it might be fun to record one of those conversations. We decided to try a spin on a format I had played with about five years ago, where random topics are presented to the crew for a set amount of time and BOOM, The Candy Factory 5BY5 was born.
It’s been a ton of fun so far and I’m really looking forward to seeing how this show develops.