You can name every podcast you listen to. You have never once asked what they all agree about.
Podcasts, news sources, social accounts you follow, newsletters in your inbox, books on the nightstand, shows you watch, YouTube channels you subscribe to. Be comprehensive and be honest: the guilty pleasures count as much as the serious material, and they are usually the ones doing the quiet work.
build the list from your actual history, your podcast app, your YouTube subscriptions, your inbox. Memory edits this list flatteringly.
Paste the list with a prompt along these lines: analyse this media consumption list, and tell me the dominant ideas and worldviews it reinforces, the biases and blind spots it builds in, and what vision of the world it is shaping. Then suggest alternative sources, from different cultures, politics or disciplines, that would take me outside it.
What surprises you. What makes you uncomfortable. What has been completely absent and you never noticed. Write down the two or three gaps that feel like they matter, not all of them.
arguing with the analysis. Whether it is right about you is beside the point. What is worth noticing is which parts you feel the need to defend.
From what it suggested, pick two or three sources that genuinely sit outside your comfort, not slight variations on what you already read. A different country, a different discipline, a different politics. If a suggestion feels comfortable, it is not the one.
Subscribe to the podcast. Add the publication to your reading app. Set a weekly reminder to open the international source. An intention that never touches your calendar or your phone will not survive the week.
Which absence in your list surprised you most, and how long has it been missing?
Where did you catch yourself wanting to defend the list rather than read it?
What has this diet been quietly telling you about what is possible and what is not?
Which of your strong opinions did you actually arrive at yourself?
Which single new source will you add this week, and where in your routine will it live?
Revisit this every 6 months, or the next time you catch yourself thinking everyone sees it this way.
Only what you wrote, nothing else on this page. It stays in your browser until you download it, nothing is sent anywhere.
Source Original practice by Mat Dufour, prompted by Walter Hickey's You Are What You Watch. Adapted by Mat Dufour.