Pointlessly Interesting Talks - Perception

A few years ago, when I was still in university, I came across a friend from school. I didn’t know that he went to the same university because we weren’t very close at that point. In school, he was a year above mine so both of us naturally hung out with our own years while in school. We did come across each other in a youth club and start connecting towards the end of our time in secondary school (high school), but only started really talking when we met at university.

Depending on your subject and schedule, you can have a lot of free time while in university so when we first met, we both had some time to kill. Another friend from school joined us that first time (many of us went to the same university). We sat in the library and were just talking about random things, and then somehow, the conversation flowed into renewable energy.

We talked for a while until a librarian asked us to go elsewhere because we were laughing so much. The conversation was quite interesting, and we even went into using water as a source of energy, mainly because the abundance of water on earth made it seem like a great potential energy source (this was before we knew that Hydrogen energy existed).

After that initial sit down, we started meeting up more often (me and the first friend I mentioned). We usually met up and sat in a café within a bookshop called Waterstones. It was a nice environment to sit down and talk. We talked about many, many things. We mostly talked about science but had many conversations about human behaviour and some abstract philosophical concepts. Eventually, for reasons for the life of me I can’t remember, we decided to record the conversations and post them as podcasts.

I simply recorded it on my phone, and sometimes did very little editing to remove background noise where possible, because we were meeting in cafes, outside in parks and so on, so noise was an issue sometimes.

The name of the podcast is Pointlessly Interesting Talks. My friend came up with the name from a random name generator, and we simply added the “Talks” in the end. I thought it was a fortuitously appropriate name since we never have any specific direction when we start talking... we just start with an interesting concept or question and then go with the flow.

Because of different schedules and life commitments, we were not consistent with posting, but have managed to post about 13 episodes so far. For now, geographical challenges will make it harder to meet up, and therefore harder to do our usual episodes.

I’m on some sort of creative flow for now after coming back to Vocal and starting a YouTube channel (unrelated to writing), so I wanted to restart the podcast. Further episodes (including the one linked in this article), will most likely be solo, but I will try to arrange something with my friend if he has time for recording, and hopefully get some guests who may be interested in the same things. This was the first Solo one I have made so I'm still honing how the flow of the whole thing will be (as I'm used to it being a conversation) and hopefully it can keep getting better.

This week’s episode: Perception

One of the main influences for my friend and I when it comes to interesting thoughts and ideas is a YouTube Channel called VSauce (link). The presenter, Michael Stevens, has a unique way of engaging the audience in learning about new and interesting things. We came across many interesting topics and ideas while watching his videos.

One of the most interesting videos of his we watched was called “Is your red the same as my red?”. Just the title alone was intriguing, so we talked about it at length after watching it.

The general concept of the video is about how internal thoughts and sensations can never be shared directly with another person, except through verbal communication, therefore, we might all be having different experiences of life.

The title of the video alludes to how we might see different things in our minds but can never prove it. This is what I will be talking about in this short podcast, which I hope you enjoy listening to, and I do also urge you to check out the VSauce video and delve into the weird and interesting!