“I get a sick kind of joy in watching people get all startled and then nervously agree to an interview.”
While freshman Riley Grant is extremely involved in the entrepreneurial community, instead of going the traditional tech or business startup route, he decided to work within the community to develop a podcast. Riley speaks to current high school students, college students, and professionals across varying fields of interest about the big questions in life.
Riley’s podcast, Pique, is a student-produced podcast focusing on how the world makes sense, or doesn’t.
When asked why he thinks his project is so meaningful, Riley said, “the coolest thing about the podcast is that it gives us a different medium to understand our surroundings. Lately, there has been a huge shift in media towards pictures and videos, and while those are great, audio in many situations simply feels more genuine. Hearing someone talk about something in podcast instead of a video, you have no choice but to focus on their words, rather than their race, height, fashion sense, or any other aspect of their appearance.”
In high school, Riley ran the Stumptown Speaker Series at Lincoln High School in Portland Oregon. Bringing business owners from the Portland area to do talks for hundreds of entrepreneurially minded students, Riley gained a significant amount of experience interviewing others, and digging into the meat of conversations. He notes, “after I finished with the Stumptown Speaker Series, I wanted to continue interviewing business leaders about what they do. The original purpose of the podcast was to record these people’s journeys and put them up online so others can learn from them. Obviously, it’s much different now, but that’s still something I really want to do and will probably take the form of a different podcast.”
There were a lot of mountains to climb along the way, especially because Riley had never produced anything like this before. His biggest hurdle to starting production was sound quality. As he says himself, “nobody wants to listen to audio filled with distracting background noise or “popped-plosives” (the distortion caused by the air blast that happens when people say words starting with p or b). I have had more problems than I’m willing to admit with sound quality, and I have several interviews that I have yet to put out because the quality isn’t where I want to it to be.” But he soon added, “the largest non-technical hurdle has to be the fear. What comes with creating anything is the anxiety that others aren’t going to like it. You need to have confidence in your process and the ideas at the foundation of the project at every step, otherwise you’re susceptible to giving up entirely.”
A couple of his favorite podcasts include This American Life, Hidden Brain, Planet Money, How I Built This, 99% Invisible, Philosophize This, and On Being. And Pique, Obviously. He believes that YouthRadio is his biggest competition. They do something similar in terms of radio journalism, but their format is strict and their podcast episodes are short. By adopting a more fluid style, Riley believes he can better accommodate a wider range of stories.
In terms of marketing and distribution of the podcast, Riley is operating on a grassroots word-of-mouth campaign. Talking to friends, family, coworkers and peers while getting in publications is key to promoting the podcast. Advertizing across the USC campus as well as other colleges in LA has been a central focus for expansion. I asked Riley what his greatest moment of success was, and he answered: “one of the coolest things that has happened to me was a high school teacher emailing the podcast saying his class loves it, and he’s actually assigned them to listen to it and answer questions about it for homework.”
Pique investigates the truth about the questions relevant to our generation, or communities, and society as a whole through interviews with people we can identify with. Next time you are at the gym, walking to class, or have a moment of time to yourself, tune in to learn something about yourself and the world around you.
Itunes Pique Podcast! Listen Up!
https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/pique/id1262508371?mt=2
Pique’s Website https://piquepodcast.live/podcast/
