In the past few months, I have tunneled deeply down the rabbit hole of social audio and video. The above picture is from a talk I did on the platform WISDOM. I moved over to WISDOM because the concept of one-on-one talks with people excited me after the pandemic experience of the addictive CLUBHOUSE with hundreds of people in a room and waiting your turn to be asked to speak. What I am realizing is that all these social and video apps have their own unique role in my life, and they are all useful. For me, I have to be very deliberate about when and why I use each one. Here’s my analysis of WISDOM.

I go on WISDOM when I have something specific to talk about. On WISDOM, you title your talk, choose your categories (you can only choose 2, so choose wisely), and start your talk. You can see people come into the talk (like CLUBHOUSE), but they are not in your face. They are only visible if you click the number on the upper right hand corner as you are speaking (the number tells you how many people are there). When I am talking, I don’t really need to see who is in the audience, unless the little circle next to me tells me that someone is requesting to come up and speak with me. Then I can decide to bring them up or not. What I love about WISDOM is that you can choose your guest time limit ahead of time and the default is 10 minutes. So if you set your time limit for 15 minutes, when the time runs out, you have the choice to tell them to ask for more time and you’ll bring them up again, or politely tell them thanks for sharing. Why I am featuring WISDOM today is that I find it refreshing to be vetted before you are a TOP MENTOR. You link your socials to your profile, and you are assigned a yellow checkmark for TOP MENTOR, which I have, once you are approved. You apply for a category to be a mentor in and I chose music and theater. BUT….through trial and error, I decided one day to ask my mother to download WISDOM and I had the idea to do intergenerational talks with her. I noticed no one was doing anything like that. So the first day we did it, the above picture is what the WISDOM app tweeted out about my mother and I doing our talk. I called it “WISDOM FROM MOM AND ME” and was 37 minutes and 48 seconds long. (WISDOM saves all your talks immediately under your profile picture, so if you want to check it out, be my guest.) In any case, we started to sort of get a following as this mother-daughter act. My mother is extremely tech savvy for her 86 years on the planet and we have an amazing time talking about everything from rotary phones and the good old days, to current events in the news, to her perspective of my career in music. Every once in awhile I sing one of my songs live, or play a song from one of my musicals on my talks with her. Martha Barsha is one of the great names of all time, and it looks cool to have Debra Barsha and Martha Barsha right next to each other in little circles. At present, I have done 75 talks on WISDOM with titles like “MY CHILDHOOD PIANO”, “THERE’S ROOM FOR EVERYONE”, “ANDY WARHOL WAS RIGHT – 15 MINUTES OF FAME”, and “BROADWAY SHOWS ON HOLIDAYS”. Those are the talks I have done without mom. They were fulfilling for me, but nothing beats reviewing Netflix shows with mom, or just having her talk about her experience on Earth for 86 years. We are creating a legacy for her. She always wanted to be heard. Now she has the chance. Check us out: https://app.wisdom.audio/talks/0e8a1efe-38dd-11ec-a842-0e6aee9420d7