Charlottes coup de ville, Virginia — “I don’t even go to class anymore. Everything I ever need to know about everything ever, I can learn about right here in my phone.” This is the mantra held by fourth-year student Carl S. When prompted about his steady dependence on podcasts he explained it was not a dependence but rather an efficient means of collecting knowledge; a “way of life.” Carl considers himself a member of the “U.Va. podcast elite,” a relatively small coalition of students enthralled in the audible realm of academia obscura.
He and confidants in the pursuit of such knowledge have a shared joke among themselves. “I love going to parties and having people try to share some piece of trivia they heard on the Discovery Channel. It’s like a child explaining the nuances in flavor of an IPA to the founder of Fat Tire — foolish. The fact of the matter is that I already know about the dangers of the over-fishing Humuhumunukunukuapua'a, and the ins and outs of CRISPR technology because Robert Krulwich already told me about it, son! My podcast bros get it.”
Carl and his podcast bros are in the process of starting a nonprofit organization geared toward sharing the “art of podcast” with children in rural Malaysia, Namibia and the Midwest.
According to Carl, “School is obsolete. Manual eye scanning of the written text is obsolete. Children all across the world can learn everything there is to know about the world just by downloading and listening to podcasts and then applying that knowledge to different areas of life, such as when you’re at a party and you ask a girl if she’s heard a podcast on a topic. What topic? What podcast? The answer to both is: all of them.”
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Sarah Alberstein is a Humor writer.
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