As a person who walks to campus, the grocery store and my friend’s house, I have little time to sit down and read. Podcasts have become a staple and an easy way for me to reach my daily word count.
It’s an easy, semi-passive activity for anyone doing a variety of other tasks. Podcasts can satisfy almost any literary need. There are podcasts that can educate, report the news and lead discussions. Some even tell stories, much like the old radio shows of our grandparents’ generation.
“Everything is Alive” is a strange podcast. Host Ian Chillag spends the entire episode interviewing inanimate objects. Characters can range from a can of cola to a lamppost, a bar of soap or anything else Chillag can think of.
In the first episode, listeners meet Louis, a can of generic cola. He tells Chillag and the listeners how he was bought in a case for a 12-year-old’s birthday at a bowling alley, and when he wasn’t drunk he went home with some humans.
Louis also recounts a close encounter he had where he was almost drunk while watching “Jaws,” and how he once took a trip to Florida with these humans whose fridge he lives in.
“Everything is Alive” at first listen requires the listener to give up some of their reality, to wonder for roughly 20 minutes what it would be like if inanimate objects could talk. The listeners are supposed to ask themselves what these objects would say, what their personalities would be like and what stories they could tell.
In all my podcast listening, I have found none that do this. “Everything is Alive” is also different in how it teaches facts. Yes, this podcast will teach you things, because as stated in the show’s biography, everything the interviewee says is true.
Radiator, an energy drink from the 1920s made from radium and water mixed together, is in fact real, just like Louis said. It did in fact kill Eben Byers, a well-known industrialist at the time, and caused him to be buried in a lead-lined coffin according to Popular Science.
Theodore Gray of Popular Science reports after Byers passed away from his three bottle a day habit, the Food and Drug Administration started their crack down on radioactive health products, effectively killing the market.
It takes the same format as a Dan Brown book, telling a story which, while untrue, includes real people, places and things, blending reality and fiction into a seamless retelling of the listener’s reality, bending it into something quirky and new. It relies heavily on the listener’s suspension of disbelief and the charm of its characters — the key to any podcast’s success.
As a hybrid of an educational podcast and a story time podcast, “Everything is Alive” blends reality with the absurdity of a talking can of soda.
The show is funny and insightful, occasionally bringing small pieces of wisdom to the listener, giving them the chance to look at the world from a different perspective, even if it is just for an episode.
Kali Nelson can be reached at [email protected]