How I found my favorite series to listen to

Before I start off proper, I want to say that I had a draft lined up for a hypothetical compare and contrast post between God of War’s Kratos and Grand Theft Auto V’s Michael DeSanta/Townley, based on some throwaway lines that I looked too into, specifically Thor lamenting that Kratos wasn’t the same as the Ghost of Sparta that physically deconstructed Mt. Olympus the hard way; and Trevor refusing to let Michael forget that he was a bank robber, a thief, a career criminal like he is and trying tooth and nail to bring him back into the fold. As you would expect, the comparison was very apples to oranges. RockStar doesn’t hang onto most of their cast from previous games. There’s a balance there between old nostalgia and new characters, and RockStar has a rotating body of protagonists compared to SCE Santa Monica. As a result, most RockStar characters have self-contained arcs while Kratos spent the better part of about nine games growing from pride to mournful to determined to vengeful in a manner of writing that whether by accident or on purpose mirrors the story structure of ancient Greek epics and recently Norse epics. One is a parody of American pop culture and the other is loosely inspired by Greco-Roman tales of adventure. If there’s a grain of truth to something like infinite monkey theorem, then I could probably produce a Shakespearean comparison between these convincingly, but until then I’ll keep it on the backburner.

So let’s get to the topic of podcasts.

I’m writing this from the perspective of a listener, not a seasoned podcaster. But I’ve spent a pretty long time listening to several so I figured I’d throw some pennies into that fountain. How I started was with Rooster Teeth Productions’ namesake podcast. It began around 2009 as the Drunk Tank, but at the time needed to switch names at a later date if it hoped to attract sponsors. I think, after a few years, Drunk Tank as a name would’ve been great for a podcast.

I found this out a few years ago on YouTube thumbing through the old videos because I wanted to see how much they’ve grown over the years. The first episode of the Rooster Teeth Podcast/Drunk Tank was much, much shorter than anything that had been produced after nearly a decade as an active podcast. An hour and ten minutes in 2009 compared to about three hours or more after 2014. Incidentally, the podcast wasn’t what made me an active subscriber of Rooster Teeth’s website or their YT channel. There were honestly different opportunities for me to become a subscriber early on that were brushed off. The first time was in 2013 around the Halloween season when I was 20 videos deep into a Dead Space 3 Let’s Play video, and RT’s gaming division, Achievement Hunter, bought ad space for an admittedly creative Halloween costume to show off. Almost fifteen-year-old me wanted to get back to the sci-fi action horror. I subbed to RT in 2018 after catching clips of their anime-style show RWBY in a WatchMojo.com video, and have since discovered their network of content in the Rooster Teeth podcast and Achievement Hunter’s Off Topic podcast, both of which I listened to while in college and during the pandemic.

As of writing this, they have several more podcasts that they produce, including Red Web, Black Box Down, F**kface (yes, really), and a few others, some of which I’ve listened to or are still listening to to this day. Halfway through the pandemic and in the leadup to my enlistment in the Army, I was somewhat spoiled for choice and bounced around podcasts like I bounce around YouTube channels.

A podcast I was tuned into briefly was the Joe Rogan Experience podcast. Weird story for that one, select media outlets had mentioned Joe Rogan’s name before but in a negative light. Naturally, I took to listening to some episodes myself and the context of the conversation about Rogan was out of a concern that he’d been inadvertently promoting then-unproven COVID-19 precautions as cure-alls by allowing controversial practitioners to speak on his show. When I thumbed through his episodes, I found that as an entertainer and commentator by trade, there’s no shortage of eccentric people. Rogan knows this and going back to WatchMojo.com, they have different videos detailing Rogan’s many different guests, some of which have gotten “interesting.” Here’s one video:

The sensationalism seen in modern media tends to lift firebrand personalities and ideologues to a point where a full story isn’t guaranteed. Personally, I put the blame on sensationalism around horror stories and reports, but an unintended benefit of that is wherever I see this type of outrage media, I’m at least patient enough to keep an ear to the ground and wait for every detail to be discovered before I pass judgment.

For the JRE itself, I like to think of it as a catch-all type of podcast. There’s no single point of focus; every guest is unique and brings many individual takes and opinions with them. This rotating body of personalities makes for a unique experience for each episode. Political outlets would make me believe that he’s made his platform a home for fringe ideals and beliefs, but that’s not what I found. Individuals of this stride do come on the JRE but so do many others. All in all, my conclusion is that outrage bait in modern media is very ineffective as expressed in this video:

For Joe Rogan, it’s also very misleading. Talking heads in American media can make you believe the wrong thing about a person, but then you see more of what they have to show for themselves and in my experience I’ve shaken my fists at demagogic rhetoric for lying to me and I’ll continue to do so. For more obviously political podcasts, Tim Pool is more consistent in that field, among others who were also guests on the JRE. I also think he was dealt a bad hand, especially during the height of the pandemic. All things considered, the U.S. at the time had a frustrating response to the pandemic, and I think some journalists really wanted to vent at the time. I’ve no horse in that race, so I won’t comment further on that.

As for the rest of the podcasts I’ve listened to or subscribe to regularly, the ones under the RT umbrella do have a singular focus most of the time. Red Web is hosted by Achievement Hunter personalities Trevor Collins and Alfredo Diaz and delves into unsolved mysteries, some of which have a criminal element, others tend to be centered around modern phenomena like cryptocurrency or strangely placed architecture or local abnormalities and cryptids. I emailed them once in 2021 to see if they had plans on doing an episode about the Toynbee tiles which I have seen in Lower Manhattan when I was in college.

They do have an episode on these mysterious tiles, though I can’t claim to have been the inspiration for that episode. Black Box Down is all about aviation incidents throughout history. From the early days of Wilbur and Orville Wright to modern airline industries and carriers, there’s always a story surrounding an aviation mishap of some sort. One thing I’ve noticed during a filler episode (don’t remember which one) was that most of the audience had either never flown, rarely flown, or held some irrational fear of flying in some capacity. But when they learn more about aviation and planes, the fears are alleviated somewhat.

Personally, we never made enough to fly continuously growing up. Other family members have taken me flying twice to Miami and Orlando for Disney World and Universal Studios theme park respectively, so I never had a fear of flying or aviation. Nor have I really had as much of an interest in flying. So what’s the draw for me? Well, I also wanted to know the secrets behind why planes fall out of the sky and whatever you think that may be, a lot of times it comes down to luck. It may have something to do with terrorism in a post-9/11 world, but flashy articles about aviation are likely to be older than that. You’d be shocked to learn that air hijackings were common during the Cold War era and most of the time the planes landed safely.

BBD’s hosts are also Rooster Teeth personalities, Gus Sorola and Chris Demarais. To my knowledge, this podcast is going to cease production soon as one of the hosts, Gus, has plans elsewhere, but if you want to catch up, the Rooster Teeth website and podcast apps have all the episodes.

F**kface is hosted by three more RT personalities, Geoff Ramsey, Gavin Free and Andrew Panton. The premise behind this podcast is a series of personal stories of the three guys being idiots. Funny and embarrassing stories from childhood, school, work, etc. It’s the podcast equivalent of “if you ever feel like an idiot, remember [insert overlooked example of stupidity here].” F**kface is one of my favorite podcasts, partly because its relatable and also because I’m not always in a learning mood like with Red Web and BBD. Sometimes I wanna turn my brain off.

Speaking of which:

Trash Taste Podcast is the crown jewel podcast that I subscribed to back in 2020 during the pandemic and haven’t looked back ever since. Of all the podcasts I’ve looked at (and they aren’t that numerous honestly), TT is the one that I could forget about for a while and come back to, which was what happened after I was medically separated from the Army.

Trash Taste started off with the goal of being the prime anime podcast and has gradually morphed into a slice of life experience about living in Japan, specifically the Tokyo Metro area which might itself be a city-state like Singapore. Just sayin’, I’d love a manga series at least that took place in Matsuyama or Fukuoka or something. I won’t stop ’til I find that series.

If the name is familiar to readers, then you may recall that I recommended Trash Taste and the three hosts’ YouTube channels all the way back in February of this year. The three hosts are the anime YouTubers, British-based Connor Colquhoun or CDawgVA and Garnt Maneetapho or Gigguk, and Australian-based Joey Bizinger or The Anime Man. All three of them began their journeys on YouTube mostly independent of each other, but with a soft spot for anime.

Garnt’s first videos were reuploads from 2007 reviews he did of series like Bleach, FLCL, Lucky Star, and K-On! as examples. Early on, the inspiration of Zero Punctuation was strong, but similar to what befalls many creators, Garnt eventually found his footing and got to reviewing anime his way. So if the first video is titled “Bleach Review,” a review of Chainsaw Man or Call of the Night would be something along the lines of “Manga’s Newest Best Boy,” with Pochita in the thumbnail somewhere. Additionally, with many anime getting slated for adaptations in a year, a smart move on Gigguk’s part was to quickly summarize the anime of the season.

Connor’s early videos were made up of prank calls while impersonating the star character of the Black Butler anime. He also briefly hosted a podcast based around voice acting, which is what the VA in his online handle stands for. Connor’s content doesn’t really separate himself from his hobbies; he makes himself quite clear that he’s a gamer, a JoJo fan, a Hunter x Hunter fan, a Black Butler enjoyer, and a voice actor. As an added bonus, he mentioned a few times on his channel, in collabs and on the podcast itself that initially, his audience was 93% female, hence the moniker on the associated subreddit “The 93%.”

Finally, Joey. Unlike the other two, Joey the Anime Man has a closer connection to Japanese pop culture being half-white, half-Japanese, or in Japanese law, a hafu. He’s very in tune with his Japanese side to the point where his articulation is better than most Japanese people in Japan. Much of his older content, from my point of view, was rather short form. He started off with anime-centered content (read: hot takes), but was also doing a bunch of other stuff as well. Anime news, manga recommendations, and also gameplay videos, which he has long since moved away from.

All three do still make content on their individual channels, stream on Twitch and upload the VODs for those who are unable to tune in on Twitch live. All of these are recommendations all their own if you’re capable of supporting their content.

The reasons for choice in podcasts are all complex and varied, but I remember listening more closely to the Rooster Teeth and Off Topic podcasts so that I could have non-distracting background noise for homework assignments. I had the radio in the background tuned to my city’s classic rock radio station perpetually since around middle school. It relaxes me. But around the time I was in college, I wanted more. So I turned to podcasts, which admittedly was rough around the edges in the beginning. Only now have I realized after trial and error that you don’t exactly need to put all of your undivided attention into a podcast episode 100% of the time. You can, but all in all, I like to think most podcasters expect a healthy mix of active and passive listeners.

I should also mention that years before Trash Taste debuted in 2020, Gigguk had an anime podcast on his own channel known as Podtaku, a portmanteau of Podcast and Otaku, but as explained in this video, that podcast ran into a whole host of problems surrounding direction and timing:

I’m certain there are OGs who remember these days, and thanks to these experiences, the anime community arguably has one of the best podcasts to date, even if it’s more about living in Japan then just anime alone. And I think that’s for the best — Podtaku practically walked so Trash Taste could run.