Backyard Podcasters Shed and Five Walls
Back yard faraday shed, 3 by 2 metres.
Backyard shed, 3 by 2 metres. With a deck. The side compartments are five metres by one. Make it in wood. I guess. It is just an experiment. If it works, it is a nice project. It is something DIYers could do quite nicely. Maybe put some doors in the side compartments, and a skylight on top. Or maybe just have a glass front door and a window above/behind the bed. Cubes of crushed aluminium cans (preferably clean cans) measuring 40 cm by 40 cm seems about right. Maybe kit-set or partial prefabrications of these could be made in time. But the DIY version could be a prototype. I think that ideas like this might be really smart. (Or maybe it might just be cheaper and easier to convert a few bedrooms in a pre existing house. Especially a house on piles.)
Maybe a really important factor is that we need the manufacturing and supply of appropriately sized cubes of crushed cans to be available for sale. Like a good supply line, a good market for them and so on. And then it becomes easier to build these things. And totally clean cubes of crushed aluminium cans might be even better. It’s just a thought. Maybe 40 by 40 by 40.
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Longer building, similar to the above.
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Backyard podcasters shed (or podcast listeners shed)
For Americans, if I were doing products for USA. Sit in your back yard and create podcasts or listen to them. It might be quite affordable over time! And you can just have normal Skype conversations.
It might cost in the ballpark of 12k nzd in total, ball park.
$7000 in usd, maybe could get it lower to something like 4-5000 usd over time. I don’t know how much material is needed, or how expensive basic tin sheds are.
Maybe all of the people of your local neighbourhood can listen to podcasts in there too.
One person creates the California and friends: news and discussion podcast, it’s 30 minutes long. And it has 1 million listeners globally, 600000 of them in California alone. People listen to them in their back-yards, but they share their sheds. There is a lot of sharing. People share the podcasts p2p over Facebook, WhatsApp or telegram or other chat apps. The files are fully encrypted and disguised. Like, you finish up listening on your own laptop, but you transfer the audio file onto an old thumb stick to put into a stereo in the shed, so that other people can listen to the show in their shed. And maybe throughout the week, 300 other people use the same shed to listen. And so you can reach lots of people locally. Maybe 4-5 people can fit into the shed at once to listen to it, and then they can talk about it afterwards.
It is a shed that people can use to listen to podcasts.
And also to record and create them.
It’s a great for of social entrepreneurship and social enterprise. It might help Americans to break free of the attempts of their universities to create an environment where only university educated people have opinions. A monopoly on opinions and speech. It also helps people to socialise on their own terms, and to have their own minds again. Furthermore, it shields them from corporate repression.
Note: you end up with tens of thousands of them all across America and the world.
For example: Roman Mars, Dan Carlin and Ira Glass all do a podcast together. One is in New York, one is California and one is in Oregon. They all are sitting in their home, back-yard podcasting shed talking. They talk for one hour and forty five minutes. It is then edited by Roman Mars and becomes a podcast that is one hour and fifteen minutes long. He encrypts it and zips it, naming it “potato salad recipe 1”. He then shares it from his Facebook messenger account to a friend, Dan Benjamin, and includes the decryption key “ham sandwich 123”. Dan Benjamin is also sitting in his back-yard shed. And then Dan Benjamin then shares it to 500 of his friends to seed it into the wider community and the world in general. People listen to it in their back yard faraday sheds, and let their friends, family and neighbours use their shed also. So that many people can hear the news and discussion podcast. It has a reach of a million globally, and growing. It is October 2026.
All names are fictitious and not meant to refer to any real people.
They also distribute newsletters and newspapers, which are printed on site. Also, some podcasters permanently live inside faraday shielded environments. Interview podcasts become very, very popular. Not just panel discussion shows See also: Leo Laporte’s show triangulation, and the Tim Ferris show.
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And if you want, just communicate through a bull horn from within your faraday shed. Or another type of PA system. Why use internet communication and zeros and ones when analogue communication works JUST FINE. Imagine these in the inner city! See also the other version I created further down the page. It is made out of cinderblocks.
Imagine a faraday shed in your front yard, speaking into the street. Imagine it in a busy, crowded city environment. Or maybe in a relaxed quiet small town environment. For best results, surround it with a chain link fence. They can have line of sight on you, and sound can travel, but you have security and safety.
Maybe Dunedin, on North Castle Street (near where all of the students live). Maybe in Palmerston North, in an area with a lot of foot traffic. Or Christchurch near the university. Just like any old University town, with normal suburban houses, and without the “gentrification”. Portland, Oregon. Louisville, Kentucky. Or aborigines in Australia. Put a faraday shed (maybe the cinderblock version) in the front garden, and a chain link fence around it, with barbed wire on top, and broadcast loudly from within it.
Or…
What about a place like Cairo? It is an overcrowded city. You use a megaphone to speak from there. Perhaps you become an anchorite/hermit. You can say anything. Conduct open air meetings from the shed into a small open area …
I can’t actually find an ideal example spot for it. Maybe he starts talking about the war in the Middle East, or the ongoing holocaust of the elderly going on globally. Nursing homes, nurses, brain fry attacks, forcing people to move towards euthanasia.
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This is another idea:
Five walls (and a sponsorship model)
Start a shanty town in who knows where. University Students. Central America or something. Or New Zealanders in Palmerston North or Dunedin. And get overseas tech millionaires to support it. Sponsor a cabin or two. Sponsor a wall in the shanty town 20 metres long, two and a half metres high, 50 cm wide, fifteen metres long, and covered in concrete. With foundations well put together. And get ten of these paid for by Silicon Valley millionaire refugees. Sink the wall down into the ground too, maybe. So it’s 1 metre deep and 2.5 metres above ground. Build them 5 metres apart in a field. And build a shanty there. Success! And they then provide refuge for all and sundry. Or just get sponsorship for your front garden 5 shed model. To expand it.
Idk, Kenya, South Africa, Lesotho, Burkina Faso, Nigeria, Swaziland. Shanty town. Tents first, build shanty town later, then build better houses over 3-6 months.
New Zealand or Australia!!! Or Wales, England, Scotland, Ireland. Just do a tent city!!! Ahhhh. It’s a refugee camp. Tents first, build shanty town later, then build better houses over 3-6 months.
Haha, I shouldn’t say this: New Masada, new parihaka, or it’s just like fleeing the Soviet invasion of the nation of Hungary, or sheltering yourself from the Nazi Blitz. Maybe Parihaka is a good one (an inspiration for Ghandi and Tolstoy I think). Parihaka: sometimes when you lose, you still win in some ways (they screwed up on some property rights issues, but it’s complicated). Altruistic: solve problems. It wouldn’t be new Masada tbh. Because people would just sprinkle these walls into slums… and add in a few sheds too.
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Or just use it as a forum. Like a place for discussion. Have it put in place as an art installation. And then have the local city or town council fund the installation of 5 - 20 of them locally (assuming they work).
It’s the sort of thing you build in the park.
It’s a forum for discussion. You can just congregate there to talk, think or walk about. Children can even play there. Just pretend that it is an art installation.
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Third idea: NY city, put some faraday shielding in your local neighbourhood bodega? Maybe just enough to disrupt the entrance way and the space where people line up? Idk.
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Fourth idea:
A country somewhere, a sovereign nation-state. Or perhaps a constituent state in a federation. Let us call them "country X". Perhaps New Zealand, Tatarstan, Dagestan, Georgia, Zimbabwe, Swaziland, Khazakstsn, or something, anything. Or even a smaller political entity such as appenzell canton or a local council in Sweden, or the local party machine in Sweden. Or Iceland. Or Japan.
Every one of their top political leaders, top bureaucrats, top military officers and top business leaders and top police officers builds a 5 shed model in their back yards. They run an ethernet cable and power cable into it, put a table and a chair inside. And they start a group WhatsApp chat to talk to one another. Or something like telegram, on their laptops. Whatever the encrypted one is. They keep a spare laptop in there. Maybe they just use something like mirc, but an encrypted version. Or maybe forums too, like phpbb. There are other options for making a nicer little shed though. Like there is no reason the middle shed can’t be a little nicer and a little larger than a 1 m by 2 m tin shed. It could be 1.2 m to 2.4 metres and made of attractive and comfortable wood, with insulation, furniture, heating and electricity (at that size I would install a fold down bed and fold down desk and a folding chair. Or it could even be made out of brick! The electromagnetic spectrum doesn’t know the difference at the level of large wave length radio waves! At least it didn’t back in Rutherford’s laboratory in Christchurch.
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To have a backyard faraday shielded shed to sit in might be the very first experience of alone time that some people have ever had. It could be their very first taste of solitude. It could be the only place where they can socialise on their own terms (either online or in person). It could be the only place where they can be online with their own thoughts and a pen and paper. Or a diary.
Their very first taste of solitude.
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Or better yet, what if you did this four time over? Side by side by side?
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Cinder block version of the backyard podcasters shed
Or use it as a dining room. Where else in all of the world can you even sit to enjoy a meal with a few friends, and a conversation, without worrying about what the voices in your head think about what you’re saying and thinking at the dinner table.
Where else can you enjoy socialising without people criticising you for your dinner table conversation? You can socialise just with your friends, excluding those who you dislike. Where else can you socialise and eat together without the interruptions of uninvited (electronic) dinner guests?
You could use it to have dinner with your family. You could sit at a folding table, on chairs you brought in from the main house. And just put them all back afterwards, so that it could then just be used as an office, reading room, sitting room or study.
It is cinder blocks, plus some sort of roof. I don’t know how to do cinder blocks roofs. Add in doors. It is kind of cramped, but it should hopefully work. It has a lot of crushed cans to be used to disrupt the radio waves which triangulate you, and scan for your nerve tissue. I’m not sure how thick the cans need to be. Maybe 50 cm think, maybe more, maybe less.
Other use case: turn it into a public toilet. So that you can poo in peace, and have a bit of a think while on the toilet. And so that these toilet bowl botherers will leave you alone.
Still all a skunkworks!
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A silly what if…
Thought experiment
The cinder block faraday shed is useful already, but it is still mostly a proof of concept thing if it works. We don't even have reliable prototypes yet. But once we do, we can do better things with these buildings.
Like building a cinderblock faraday house.
With multiple rooms.
What if we build a house out of cinder block bricks, and put it behind a chain link fence. And this model of house worked perfectly.
And then 50000 Chinese dissidents built them in places like the EU, Australia and New Zealand (places with good on the ground "rule of law" and "law and order"). And they became hermits. And they didn't leave their house. And then they connected in with one another via a special encrypted "Chinese dissident pirate dark web" that also worked alongside the "European/Anglo-English hacker dark web" based out of Australia. And they all could talk freely online. But they all have photocopiers and printing presses in their homes. And can create any kind of propaganda, advertising, media, news articles and print anything out. And they can talk openly from large loudspeakers on top of their homes. And say anything. Anything at all. And can offer back office support to any efforts that push back against China. They offer back office support to any form of activism that is friendly to Chinese dissidents (aka pro-Chinese patriots who love China, Chinese people but hate their evil Government and want to reform it [peacefully]). And they can also start like an "Underground Railroad" to support anyone harmed or injured or bothered by the CCP. Also putting them into cinderblock houses that keep them safe.
What if?
These are just ideas.
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Here is an expanded version of the cinderblock thing. Just add cans. See the other one to know where and how many cans to add. Also, add doors. And add a plumbed bathroom.
This is six rooms including one to be used as a bathroom. Put some taps outside the rooms, on the exterior walls. And put one or two large sinks out there too, on the sides of the walls. Add in doors to the rooms. And roofs exist too! Make the ground in between concrete. And put in drains. Umm. Surround it with a nice tall, sturdy wooden fence and multiple gates. I got the measurements a little bit wrong. By that I mean I made some of the rooms a little bit too small by accident. They were supposed to be 2.2 metres by 1.2 metres inside.
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An example with crushed cans included:
It’s suitable for a family home, or for an elderly couple.
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Perhaps you might make just one, for yourself.
Or perhaps you might create a neighbourhood for 250 elderly people (who can afford to pay). And the support staff associated, as well as managers, could have space to live there too. It’s a peaceful place, not built for activism. It’s to shelter the elderly who are in danger of either being killed outright (such as my Grandfather) or bullied and harassed and attacked by the system until they have themselves euthanised (such as my grandmother). They can have their minds back, and the staff can’t be micromanaged by the system - and can have their own minds!
Retirement home/village in Kapiti Coast, just north of Waikanae. For elderly afraid of getting hurt or attacked by the system. Each set of six is one home. You put a fence on the front and back of the set of six, with a gate in both the front and back.
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Or another model:
Treat it as kind of similar to storage lockups. Build 100 units within an area with chain link fence. Let people use it between 8 am and 8 pm. Or 12 midday and 10:30 pm. By storage lockups, I mean that it has a garage door on the front and is a commodity product.
Just rent out a single unit for 100 nzd (50 usd) per week.
Who uses it?
Chinese people could rent out a unit and use it for socialising: talking, Mah Jong, poker, alcohol, tea and food (door dash).
What if women had a place where they could feel their own emotions, fully? And write in a diary to process those thoughts?
When if Chinese people had a place where they could feel whatever emotions they wanted? Without being criticised? Even if they were thinking angry thoughts about the CCP?
What if married couples could have time alone together, to properly talk to one another without feeling that they were being watched? To talk and spend time together without feeling self conscious?
What if some could get together, one-on-one, to enjoy at least one unsanctioned friendship? That is, to socialise with one friend without having to talk to dregvant to get permission. And without having it micromanaged by busy bodies?
Christians could have a place to be alone to study the Bible and write in a journal. Or do Bible studies with friends.
Sisters could get together to gossip.
Mothers and daughters could get together to gossip.
Anyone could use it just for cards and socialising. Like, just play poker. Drink and socialise on a Saturday. Or out a couch and TV in there. And perhaps an Xbox.
Skype meeting encrypted tunnel to other location.
A study or library to journal inside.
A meditation room or yoga chamber.
A reading room.
An office.
Just a place to exist unmolested.
Koreans could use it to play StarCraft (jokes)
You could use it as a drinking room
Use it for comedy
You could use it for your knitting club/circle
Use it as a class room
Use it for education
Use it to house a printing press
Use it as a writing room
Use it as a movie theatre or projection room (for informative or educational films which were also produced within a faraday shielded “dead zone”)
Use it to watch TV with your friends
Use it as a recording studio
Use it as a podcast studio
Use it for poker night
Use it as a listening room
Use it for live music
Use it to play RuneScape, World of Warcraft or Eve and chat with your friends (I played a lot of RuneScape)
Use it as an animation studio
What would you do with solitude?
Anything!
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It is an excellent business idea. It could be turned into a highly scalable business model, like a turn key operation. It could be turned into a franchise model. It could be profitable, and therefore replicable! It could use the profit motive! And spread like crazy. Use the franchise model, once the kinks have been worked out. And that gets it out there?
I am ever so slightly inebriated. And unlike some people, I do not do my best work while intoxicated. Instead, I just end up with a sore neck and back (note to self: delete this comment later).
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Another attempt, I forgot to colour in the cans though.
Here it is with the cans:
Imagine having 20 of these along a gravel road, on your dairy farm, wired up for electricity and internet. With water pipes in to sinks and taps attached to the front.
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