Dead Air Podcast

Debating Literacy, in Print Two essays recently came across my feed, each circling the fate of literacy in our digital environment. In Why You Can’t Focus Anymore , Carlo Iacono argues that we haven’t become post-literate so much as “post-monomodal,” suggesting that our challenge is not the death of books but the casino-like feeds that fracture attention. In The Dawn of the Post-Literate Society ,...

Fall 2017. The weekends belonged to the “green room.” Not the velvet-draped VIP kind, but the converted garage in my screenwriting partner’s Santa Monica backyard — half man cave, half writers’ room. It smelled of stale smoke and beer funk, empties stacked in the corner, ashtrays overflowing from the night before. That was where Zero A.D. began to take shape. We were two guys with full-time jobs —...

You’re in the car, late at night, halfway between two towns. The radio dial won’t hold steady. A rock station bleeds into a Christian station, guitars colliding with parables, a weird hybrid signal that exists only on the crest of the hill. Drive a mile in either direction and one station wins. But in that moment — messy, static-laced, impossible to reproduce — the overlap is its own kind of sermo...

Setup I didn’t plan on writing a book. At least, not right then. What I wanted was something smaller — a way to test whether this machine could actually work with me, not just for me. I’d already tried it once, asking ChatGPT to draft an “astrological weather” post for Daljeet. It got the style right but the sky wrong. Still, something about that near-miss stuck with me. So I kept poking. Over the...

The cursor was blinking. My home studio was quiet. I was drafting a monthly blog post for Mutable Fire — my astrology-themed publication I write under the pseudonym of Daljeet Peterson, a spiritual name I’ve used since 2020 for work aligned with my wider spiritual practice. This time, curiosity got the better of me. I wondered: could ChatGPT write this as well as I can… maybe even better? So I ope...

In radio or live TV, “dead air” is the nightmare — a dead mic, a silent feed, the audience hanging in the void. It’s the absence of signal, the one thing every broadcaster learns to fear. But step into our current media ecology and the metaphor flips. Silence is rare. What's everywhere is the static: a billion voices talking past each other, the endless churn of recycled takes, the hum of what som...

Last month, I sold my house, moved into my parents' basement, and decided to start a one-man content studio with AI as my creative partner. Yup, you read that right. Fifty-five years old. Three decades in television. And now, downstairs at Mom and Dad’s — not because I’ve given up, but because I’m actually doubling down. It’s not a midlife crisis—that happened 13 years ago. I’m calling this a midp...