About This Podcast:
This podcast is centered around humans. More specifically, we focus on the famous question: are humans born evil or good? In order to get different perspectives on this, my friend and I went to the streets of San Francisco to ask random strangers this question. We got varying answers and included them all in our podcast. We then further discussed why we believe humans are actually born as caring, loving individuals using past events and other research to support our argument.
Podcaster Bios:
My name is Elli Lahdesmaki and I created this podcast with my friend Leila Boisvert. We both attend Los Altos High School and Freestyle Academy. Leila takes film at Freestyle and it has always been a passion of hers. Outside of school, you can catch her on stage. She is a great actress and has also been singing and playing piano for 11 years. I take design at Freestyle, which has allowed me to explore my own artistic creativity and voice. I’m also a graphic artist and writer for my school’s newspaper, which I have dedicated a lot of time to. Outside of school, I love to listen and create music and go outdoors (beach, mountains, hikes, etc!).
Intro to the Podcast:
Our English class asked us to create a podcast about anything we wanted. At first, we were conflicted on what we wanted to discuss in our podcast. After some thinking, we decided that we definitely wanted to go out and ask strangers a question to get many perspectives on a single idea, but we didn’t know what to ask. We thought deeply about an important but controversial topic, and came to the big question of asking strangers if humans are born evil or good. We had to be creative and come up with ways to find strangers to ask our question thoughtfully, while also creating a podcast that would be interesting for people to listen to. My inspiration for this project was a Youtuber, Thoraya Maronesy. Most of her videos are mainly her going out and asking strangers deep and thought-provoking questions. I admire her ability to connect with strangers and get them to open up to her in such a short amount of time.
Podcast Process:
Reflection:
I appreciated the freedom in this project. It was very self-driven and we were allowed to really focus on what is interesting to us. In addition to learning about the production behind a good podcast, I also got more familiar with editing on Pro Tools. Our biggest challenge in this project was going up to strangers and getting good, thoughtful answers to our question. At first, it was a little scary to approach complete strangers on the street, but I became much more comfortable doing it and it was actually really fun to start up random conversations with strangers. I would definitely look into making more podcasts in the future.