#60 Let me bore you to sleep - Jason Newland (4th December 2018)

Hello and welcome to jasonnewland.com. My name is Jason Newland. This is let me bore you to sleep. Number 60, I think.

Yeah, number 60. I think at the beginning of yesterday's session I said it was number 49, but I actually meant 59. Which means yesterday's was 59 and this one is the one next, which would be 60, according to my memory of numbers and counting.

So technically this is the most sessions that I have ever recorded in a series ever. Technically. The reason I say technically is because, well firstly I'm showing off my broad array of vocabulary, but also there was a time when I numbered the relaxation sessions and I had over a hundred.

I still do, but there was a time that I used to name them. I used to just give like relaxation number one, relaxation number two, relaxation number three, relaxation number four, you know, until however many I had. And then I started naming the sessions in the same way that I did probably over 50 daily hypnosis sessions.

And I used to just call them daily hypnosis number one, daily hypnosis number two, daily hypnosis number three, daily hypnosis number four, you know, depending on which one it was. Of course if it was daily hypnosis number seven, then I'd call it number seven. So, but then a while later I decided to re-listen to them and give them a name, give the sessions a title rather than just daily hypnosis number one or daily hypnosis number two or daily hypnosis number three, you know.

So that's what I do. But 60 is quite a good number to have reached as far as these sessions go. I've been doing them for quite a few months now.

So before I continue with the, you know, actually do this session because I realized that what I've been talking about so far has probably been quite exciting. So before I start being boring, I should just remind you to only listen to this or watch this if you're watching on YouTube or, you know, wherever you're listening to it. So only listen when you can safely close your eyes.

It will be available. This will be available on my website to stream and to download. And it will also be available on various different podcasts that I have as well.

But, you know, I think the websites possibly one of the best places to go to really because you can stream it, listen to it, or you can download it. But you can go on SoundCloud. It'll be available on iTunes, Spotify, you know, iHeartRadio, Stitcher, Player FM, you know, various different places.

Spreaker as well. I'm actually recording it on speaker as we speak. Well, not as we speak, but as I, yeah, I'm recording my voice.

Otherwise, how would you hear it? I suppose I could, I could do these live. But I can't be bothered. I can't just, I don't know, quite, I've done a lot of these live.

And it's something quite nice about being able to just sit back and not get too bogged down with, you know, whether or not it goes, you know, this, for example, if the internet cut out or, which means that it would like ruin the live session. And also, when I make live streams on video, let's say streaming on Facebook, or streaming on YouTube, I have to get myself looking pretty. And, you know, for my adoring audience.

But when I'm just making an audio, I can sit here in my clown costume. And I can hold my banjo, I don't have to play it because it could disrupt the session. I just start going But I don't have to dress up, I can just wear my normal, casual, lay around clothes.

So that there is a kind of a benefit and doesn't matter what time of the day I make a recording, because it doesn't matter what the lighting is like, which it does with, you know, making videos. So I was thinking of, maybe I should celebrate this being the 60th session. So I'm just gonna wiggle the toes on the left foot.

That's it. I've done that as a celebration over with. I suppose the next real celebration should be when I hit the centenary, you know, get to the hundred mark.

And maybe, maybe I could do a live stream to celebrate the hundred. I don't know. I mean, if that's, if I do one every day at this month, the hundred mark will be sort of middle of January, I suppose.

2019. Yeah, we'll see. I suppose really, because I can broadcast this live, the audio.

It's like, kind of have my own radio station in a way. So I can broadcast the audio live. So maybe I might consider doing that.

Just have to, have to wait and see. Wait and see. So I have, I have actually, hopefully get the words out now.

I have actually done that in the past, where I've, it's not called streaming live, is it? When it's audio. Maybe it is. Maybe it is streaming live.

I seem to, I've got it in my head that when you say streaming live, you're talking about videos or, you know, film, where you can see the person on the screen, a moving picture. But perhaps audio, the spoken word, is still classed as streaming, maybe. I really don't know.

I kind of liked the idea in the past of having a radio show. There's a few ideas of radio shows that I quite like. I think would be where I would be kind of like a standard radio DJ, you know, just chatting in between songs.

And then I would play just the songs that I like, which is quite eclectic. It's probably mainly 80s and 90s, because that was my childhood years, and then my 20s. So from the age of 10 to 30, those 20 year period is probably my most, I don't know what the right word would be.

Nostalgic, probably. Probably my most nostalgic years when it comes to music. But I like music from the 50s, 60s, 70s, and there's loads of music that I like, you know, that's around even now.

I like Miley Cyrus's new song. It's just when I was younger, or maybe there was more, there's quite a few music shows on television. We used to have a particular popular television show aimed specifically at the music charts.

So every Thursday evening, about, I think it was about 7.30, might have been seven o'clock. But I think it was 7.30. So it was called and it was on for about half an hour. And then every Christmas day, there'd be an extended version, which would last about one hour with the Christmas number one, which was always quite a big deal.

Especially I imagine to the person whose song was number one at Christmas. And a bit when they got to number one, they did more, way more to celebrate than just wiggling their toes. So Top of the Pops used to be on pretty much every week for 20 or 30 years.

So I grew up with it. I used to watch it. I even remember watching Top of the Pops with Blondie singing The Tide is High.

That was one of my favourite songs at the time. But then I guess it was a lot of people's favourite song because it was number one. It was the most bought song.

And I think those were the days before radio plays were included in the charts. I think in probably the 90s. I'm pretty sure the 90s or the 2000s, radio airplay used to count towards the popularity of the songs in the charts.

I don't think I made that up. I think it did happen. And then of course, with the internet and streaming music on iTunes, which has been the main place for quite a while, and still is apparently, and those streams go towards the charts as well, the downloads.

And then things started to change even more because although the general public were purchasing less CDs and then sort of buying the downloads from the computer and downloading the songs instantly or the albums instantly onto their computer or laptop, or nowadays probably more the phone. And then Spotify came along and changed things up even more. So now the charts, because Spotify is a place where you don't, I don't know, I don't think you can download albums.

Maybe you can pay for the actual album, but as far as I'm aware, their main framework of how they operate is you can listen to a lot of stuff on there for free with adverts, but also you can pay a certain amount a month where, I don't know, is it £7, £8 a month, and then you can listen to as much as you want without adverts and you can skip forward to the next song and all that stuff. And now the streams, even though they're not being bought in the same way as iTunes used to sell or still does sell singles, I'm not sure how many streams constitute a sale. So it's changed the charts quite a lot.

So it's not just about how many people buy singles or CDs from the shops. It's not just about maybe, I don't know if radio, airplay is still included. It's not just about how many singles are sold online and downloaded via iTunes and other stores.

It's also now about the streams, how often, how many times an artist has their music streamed and played on Spotify and maybe other platforms as well. But Spotify is now the second most popular place to listen to music online after iTunes or Apple Music. I can see that Spotify may take the top.

They may become the most popular eventually. See, I'm on both. I'm on Spotify with quite a few of my podcasts.

Also on iTunes as well. So my main podcast, which is hosted by SoundCloud, is, I'm trying to think, it gets a lot of its traffic from iTunes. With Spotify, what they do is it's a different kind of procedure to iTunes because iTunes, they, if you were, let's say it's a podcast, it's a different process.

If you are selling something for money, then there's a different process involved. But if you have, like I do, a podcast and on my SoundCloud podcast, there's 800 plus recordings, but iTunes only holds the last 250 recordings on the podcast. I think it is, or is it 125? 125.

I think it's 250. So with iTunes, you don't upload your MP3 files directly to iTunes. You just submit the RSS feed, the podcast feed to iTunes that comes from whichever podcast host that you are using.

So for me, my podcast hosts are SoundCloud and Spreaker. They're the main ones. I do have some podcasts on Podomatic as well.

And I think on Spreaker, how many have I got? How many different ones? I'm not sure how many. But with iTunes, you submit the RSS feed and then they just check it in a few days' time and then they submit it to the podcast directory. Then you start getting traffic, start getting people watching, not watching, listening rather.

With Spotify, when you submit your RSS feed, the podcast feed to Spotify, they sometimes take a few weeks to process the request. But when they do, when they do accept it, they actually download all of the sessions from your podcast and upload them to their own server so they're not streaming from the podcast, your podcast, which means that if for any reason I was to delete any of my podcasts, they would still be available on Spotify, which is, I suppose, quite a good thing. Yeah, I quite like Spotify.

I'd like it more if I had a headset. I don't know, just a nicer headset. By headset, I don't mean like, you know, flying a jet, being a jet pilot, that kind of headset, or being in a call centre, or being a skateboarder, you know.

I suppose that's a helmet, isn't it? I have been called a helmet in the past. So I, with the iPhone, I got these little earbud things that, you know, that are used as headphones and they're supposed to go in your ear and I'm guessing they're supposed to stay in your ear. Well, that's not happened with me.

They just keep falling out and I wonder to myself, and out loud obviously to you, that maybe my ear holes are a bit bigger than average. It's, you know, I look at my ear and I think, is the hole too big? Have I got a big hole? Is my hole larger than the average person? Because the earbuds just fall out and they don't disappear inside. It's always a rope to pull them back out again, isn't it? Because of this the plastic string thing that's attached to them.

I realise it's not plastic string, it's wire or plastic string, but they genuinely just keep falling out. So they don't fall inwards. So my holes, my hole can't be that big.

There's nothing's falling inside my hole. But there's, they're just constantly falling out of my ears. And they're usually okay in the event of me maybe making a phone call.

So I can do a phone call without holding the phone to my ear. You know, for that period of time, they're usually pretty much okay. But if I try to walk to the shops, you know, I've got Audible.

I don't know if you've heard of Audible. It's an app that you can download for free. But you know, you need to sign up with Audible.

And I think it's £7.99 a month. You can download audiobooks and you get one credit each month for any amount. So you can buy a book of any financial cost and download it and you can listen to the book because it's an audiobook.

And if you, and I've never done this myself, but if you want to just reject one of the audios and send it back, they will replace it with another audio of your choice. As I said, I've not done it yet and I don't know if they give you another credit or I don't know how it works. But I've bought a few books and I've had a few credits.

I've got some psychology books, a psychotherapy book I'm listening to. And because I'm an auditory person, I'm very listening, eerie. Eerie, not E-E-E-R-Y or E-E-R-I-E.

But hearing, you know, like with my ears. And yeah, I like to listen. And one of my ways that I enjoy learning is by listening more so than by reading.

So to be able to read a book by listening to it is, it means that I read the book a lot quicker than I would do if I was reading it. And also, my eyes don't get tired, which is a good thing. I find my eyes get a bit tired when I read.

So it might, I don't know, maybe it's to do the medication I'm on, kind of get a little bit tired anyway. But I used to, I've been an avid reader. I've really, I used to get excited about books.

I used to have a, I used to have a library of about 500 books. About 10 years ago. And then gradually, they kind of, I moved to this town to, well, it's more than 10 years ago, it was 2007.

I moved to do the degree in counselling. I moved into this tiny room. And I had all my books stored in these containers.

These like plastic containers, and they were taken up half the room, basically up to the ceiling. And I'd be banging into them and tripping over them sometimes. And so eventually, I started to get rid of some of them.

And the first ones to go were the philosophy books. So I gave that, I donated those to charity. And then I sort of went through that.

And I got to the point where, yeah, after the degree course, yeah, I was also getting rid of some of the counselling books as well. And the main books that were left were the hypnosis books. And I ended up, you know, again, I was living in another small room.

This time it was damp, and it was the books were getting mouldy and all that stuff. So I ended up getting rid of those books. So I've now got, probably got about 100 books.

And I'd love to be able to get my book collection up again, especially the hypnosis books. I do intend to get a nice big collection again. But I remember when I was young, I used to have like different things that I would do.

Sometimes if I was full of energy, I'd be running around at break time at school, playtime, and I'd be causing trouble and just being cheeky and, you know, zooming around 1000 miles an hour. And then other times, I would hide in a corner and read a book for, you know, days on end. I mean, during the break times.

And I went through a phase where I was reading Star Trek books, based on the original Star Trek characters, you know, Spock and Captain Kirk and all those people. I don't know what year I was in. Then, probably, I was probably about 13.

11, 12, 13. Yeah, probably about 13. I think.

Yeah. So I used to do that. I'm not sure if I used to buy the books, or if I got them from the library, because I used to do both.

I used to, I was a very frequent visitor to my local library during my childhood. I used to love getting the new books, especially the ones maybe in the children's section, because I was a child, you know, or kind of the young adults reading. But I also liked factual stuff.

I quite like reading. A lot of the factual books, you couldn't take them out of the library. They were part of the reference library, you know.

So they were big books, and they weren't allowed to be taken out. So sometimes I would sit and read them. But I liked the smell of a new book, the print.

And it was something about holding something that nobody else had touched. And the oddity of doing that ran out once I got into my teens. But yeah, it was something about just having like the fresh smell of the printed page, and knowing that no one else had read it, even though thousands of people had probably read it, or you know, but just other copies of that book, not that particular book itself.

I like the idea of being the first person to read that copy of the book. I used to also have my own collection of books. Then my dad had this, he put some shelves up for me.

But they weren't, they're like on a, I'm trying to think back to it. So I think there was at least two shelves, and there was this, and they were just like on their own. But one on top of the other, you know, with a gap on the wall.

And I used to try and put something either side of the books as like an end, you know, a stopper to the books, a bookend or whatever you want to call it. But the books got too heavy, and they kept falling off. The shelves kept collapsing because there was too many books on there.

And especially during my phase of science fiction, I went through a phase when I was reading really, really big, thick, extremely adult science fiction books. I don't know how I got into it, but I used to really like reading them for a while. I'm trying to think what other books, oh, I'll tell you, I'll tell you, let me tell you this.

There was a book that I found to be one of the funniest things I'd ever read ever when I was a kid. And I was probably, I was a teenager, so I wasn't like a small child, but I was a small teenager. I wasn't very big.

But this book was called Wilt, W-I-L-T, and it was Tom Sharp that wrote it. And it's one of the first books that I ever read that made, that I did was laughing out loud, really laughing, really strongly laughing. So I think I read all of the books in the season, in the series that he wrote.

And it's a very famous author. He did, was it Portership Down and, or Porterhouse Down, something like that. He did, he wrote a lot of different books.

But this, the Wilt books were pretty much my favorite. And then I went through a phase when I was, I think when I left school, I got into psychology, started reading psychology books. And I quite liked the textbooks, you know, the big, thick, massive introduction to psychology books.

I used to read them, used to buy them. And then there's a book that really, or some books that really sort of stick in my memory. In 1989, or was it 88? Might've been 88, but might've been 89.

Maybe it was 88. I don't know. And I think it was 89.

I traveled to, you know, I decided to move to Spain. And I was going to live there, get a job in a bar or as a pole dancer, or I don't know, just something. I was young.

I figured I could get some, you know, some kind of work. So I bought a ticket in the local travel agency and it was a return, but I didn't have a lot of money with me. I didn't really think it through.

And I did have a job at the time, but I just decided not to go back, which is what I did. Well, I didn't go back. So I was in the airport and on the way to the airport, I got a copy of Viz magazine.

So I was waiting for the bus or the coach to take me to the airport. And I don't remember if it was Heathrow or if it was Stanstead or if it was, where's the other airport? I don't know. You know, I'm not sure which airport it was.

So, but I bought Viz, which was a very rude comic, but for adults, like a comic paper, you know, you know, like the dandy or wizard and chips, or I used to, I used to read the dandy when I was a comic star. I used to read every week. I used to collect them for years and years and years.

I used to organize them and everything. You know, I used to buy a year. I had them for years, all the way from the age of, yeah, for probably a good five, six years, maybe four, five years.

Anyway, I got this magazine called Viz and I couldn't stop laughing. It was just ridiculously funny, the stuff that was in there. And at the time, it was, it wasn't, I mean, it became so popular, Viz did, in this country.

But at the time it wasn't at its most popular. It was starting to be discovered by people. And then it became hugely popular, like probably in the early nineties.

And so I was reading this, it's very funny. And then I'm on the bus or the coach and I get to the airport and there's about 16 hours wait until the next, well not the next, until my, my flight. So I'm in this airport.

At times it was busy. At times it was pretty quiet because it was all night. So I was there all night long waiting for the early morning flight.

I got there in the afternoon, but I had to wait until early hours, you know, probably seven o'clock, eight o'clock the next day. So I was eating and I was sort of trying to get a little bit of sleep and I ended up going to the shop that was inside the airport. I never left the actual airport.

I had everything in there that I needed. And I bought a Woody Allen book. And I think it, the one I got was called Radio Days.

That was the first one I got. And there was another one called Something Feathers. Anyway, they weren't, they weren't big books.

They were quite, they weren't like long, thick books. And because I had no distractions really, and I wasn't drinking alcohol because I didn't, didn't really drink back then. So I was just reading these books and I was laughing and laughing and laughing.

I just couldn't stop laughing. It was so funny. If you've never read any of Woody Allen's books, like the early books, especially like Radio, is it Radio Days? Something Feathers.

Very, very funny. And I actually bought the books because I bought them and I might have just left them at the airport rather than carrying them around. I don't remember.

But I read about three of his books during that time of waiting for the, for the flight. And going there, I was on the plane and this lady that was sitting next to me, she actually held my hand to comfort me. That was nice.

So I got to, got to Spain, Malaga, and I bought a can of Coke and a Mars bar. So I wasn't quite sure what I was eating otherwise, because I just didn't really know my way around. And I got a taxi from outside the airport and tried to get them to take me to where the hotel was supposed to be.

They took me on a scenic route via Greece, I think, and I had to stop and see how much it was going to be. And it basically, it was costing too much. So I had to go back to the airport and I made the decision just to get the next flight back.

So that's what I did. So I spent the afternoon in Spain, got there, yeah, got there sort of midday, left about four o'clock, I was there about four hours in Spain. Yeah, I came back, didn't really have anywhere to live because I'd moved out of where I was living.

It was a funny old time. But the point is, if you haven't read the Woody Allen books, the early ones, I think it's white feathers. It's worth having a listen or having a read.

It's very, very funny. Very funny. But the Audible book app that you can get and listen to books, I think I really recommend it.

It's really cool. This has been more of a factual adventure today, but that's okay. I think each recording is different.

Just some are, I guess, some are hugely exciting like this one was. Sorry about that. I'm going to go, I think I might take a walk up to the shops.

I might take Andre with me and get some air. I mean, there's air here as well as air inside. But just, you know, get a bit of, a bit of breeze, a bit of exercise and come back and I might make another recording later.

So this is the second recording that I've done today. Yesterday, I did two as well, but I'm thinking that maybe because recording using this app directly to my podcast on Spreaker cuts out a lot of the time that I would normally need for preparation or for editing or for all that stuff, which means I can perhaps do more sessions. So I'm going to go and I'll speak to you next time.

Bye.