The podcast, Something Out of Nothing, discussed theories that believe that Shakespeare did not any of his sonnets, poems, or even plays. The speaker dives into the presence of cryptography in a lot of Shakespeare’s writing; the speaker gathered information about a unique cipher that utilized a substitute key and a form of stenography to embed messages within Shakespeare’s writing. I found it interesting how the speaker described Francis Bacon’s Bi-literal Cipher within the podcast and with a single visual aid as the SoundCloud cover image. Without the visual aid, the description of the five letter long strings of a’s and b’s used to code each separate letter would not have made sense to me. Furthermore, she included the techniques used to hide the cipher within plain sight and brought a relevance to the use of stenography in Shakespeare’s writing in comparison to other classical writers of that time. I appreciated how in depth the description was during the podcast, and how she carefully worded her description to not use heavy and technical words that could confuse me or other listen.

While the podcast did not use much audio clips from different speakers, the director of the podcast included some music breaks with appropriate music to fit these specific high intensity moments. These breaks offered the listen both a short mental break to absorb the information and to ponder some of the thoughts that the speaker just said. This discussion about stenography seems to interest me and I would like to have my podcast about some sort of modern stenography and utilize audio clips and more external resources.