Sorry to get back on topic

Rob gets together with repeat guest Mike Rapin to talk about games from DnD to Mario, learning japanese, and other random crap :)

Josh and Rob unite again to host a beautifully meandering episode about work, life, optometry, and shitty art restoration.

Rob catches up with his friend Todd who plays trumpet and teaches music in New York City. This episode was supposed to be about productivity but we veer off into philosophy and music a lot too.

Rob continues his conversation with Alex and they scratch the surface of Contemporary or "New" Music. There's minimalism, abstract forms in melody and percussion, 4 minutes of silence, and more!

No notes, just listen

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Josh changes things up and decides to be a listener of the show. Rob calls another friend, Alex Monroe, and they chat about Buddhism, music, and a few things in between.

We’ve got another special edition with Rob and guest of the show, Alex Monroe! Alex is a percussionist living in Chicago, and the Executive Director of Beyond This Point – ooh fancy. They mostly talk about meditation and the philosophy of Buddhism. Coming soon, in part two there’s an interesting introduction to modern / ‘new’ music for you too.

NOTE ABOUT THE NOTES:

If you’re looking at these show notes in your podcast player like a totally normal person, we don’t blame you; that’s how it should be. There are a lot of media excerpts in these notes however, and we highly recommend that you read the rest of this on our website. Go ahead and open it up in the background while you listen, we won’t mind

13:00 – Threads (mvt. 1), by Paul Lansky – Narration by Alan Watts – Performed by beyond this point and Matthew Duvall. Here’s the video:

16:30 – Alan Watts’ recorded lectures make up the soundtrack for this awesome hippy game called Everything. This is the trailer you heard:

Buddhism has transformed Alex’s worldview, even his politics! Rob feels like he had been somewhat Buddhist all along, but didn’t realize it until he read What the Buddha Taught. That Goodreads link has lots of options to buy or check out from a library.

27:20 – Music sampled in the background is from Satyagraha by Philip Glass, someone you’ll hear more about in Part 2. Listen to the full piece here

29:00 – Alex talks about the Headspace app, which is helping him meet his goal of meditating every day for a year! We also play audio from one of the videos just because it’s a cute mix between goofy and interesting. Here’s the Headspace ‘How It Works’ video:

44:00 – Rob refers to some books by Pema Chödrön. A pretty long, but great audiobook he listened to is called Noble Heart. A good, shorter read is The Places That Scare You.

If you want some free podcasts of Buddhism, meditation, Q&A sessions with beginners, and much more, check out AudioDharma. You can search for it in your podcast app to subscribe, or go to the website and browse for specific lectures. Rob loves talking about this stuff, so if you want to hear more, figure out a way to let us know and maybe we’ll do more like this episode./ Side note

51:00 – Totally switching gears, Alex needed to vent about his quest to find an auto part that no one had.

We’ll be back with Alex Monroe, part 2: New Music in a couple of weeks!

Check out beyondthispoint.org for photos, YouTube clips, and other great stuff.

Josh is still too busy to catch up lately, so I invited our mutual friend Mike Rapin to substitute in his absence. He does an... okay job.

Josh is still too busy to catch up lately, so I invited our mutual friend Mike Rapin to substitute in his absence. He does an… okay job.

In this episode we go way back to our early podcasting days with live Ustream feeds and the TalkShoe service that let people “call in” to our podcast recording

We also talked about chat and texting services like Slack versus Discord, and Telegram versus WhatsApp, Line, and Facebook Messenger. Learn about our Telegram group on the podcast’s about page

Remember way back in Episode 1 when Josh and I talked about finding friends as an adult is almost like dating? Mike was the one who told us about Patook back then, the app where you make a quasi-dating profile but it’s platonic

Check out Mike’s podcasts. Seriously, they’re an inspiration to us all:Getting Caught Up I Read Comic Books – now in its 5th year!! @mikerapin on Twitter and social things

Find Rob on Twitter as @robrogan or say hello to us all in the Telegram group

California burns, so Josh goes to Disneyland. Then we spend about 45 minutes talking about old roller coasters and abandoned parks and stuff. Rob doesn't like roller coasters.