Is This the Most Boring Man in the World?

From The Wall Street Journal:

Late last year Randy Smith got a text from a complete stranger. She thanked him for putting her to sleep.

Smith was shocked to discover that he was a YouTube star. The Ormond Beach, Fla., retiree was even more surprised about why: A tutorial he recorded and sold as a VHS tape in 1989 on how to use Microsoft Word had resurfaced as “THE MOST BORING VIDEO EVER MADE” with 3.1 million views and close to 11,000 comments so far.

“I can’t remember the number of times that this Video has helped me sleep,” one gushes. “I want this played at my funeral, so people don’t forget how interesting I was,” says another.

Smith, a former motivational speaker who taught presentation skills, has a voice that isn’t so much boring as comforting. It turns out, his silky-smooth delivery, combined with the now-irrelevant subject matter, makes his video perfect—for hitting the sack.

And he has lots of competition. From footage of late TV painting instructor Bob Ross to five-hour loops of the BBC shipping forecast, dull recordings are all the rage as slumber hacks in a sleep-deprived nation. Smith is puzzled.

“Why somebody who has no interest in Microsoft Word would be watching it—especially such an old version, I have no idea,” he says.

The answer: While white noise like rainshowers or ocean waves help some people, others find it easier to nod off to human yammering, such as the play-by-play of a baseball game.

If a live game isn’t available—or sounds too exciting—insomniacs these days can turn to a Chicago entrepreneur who calls himself “Mr. King” and runs Northwoods Baseball Sleep Radio, a podcast of full-length but fake baseball games on the fictional WSLP AM. He calls the matches as sportscaster “Wally McCarthy,” complete with made-up players and teams, and a friend from Minneapolis writes and narrates the ads for fictional products.

King, who will only say about his background that he “isn’t a complete novice,” hasn’t turned fake radio announcing into a full-time career yet.

But Benjamin Boster of Pleasant Grove, Utah, is literally living the dream. The 43-year-old trained vocal performer’s boss once told him he had a boring voice. Now he has made a side hustle, his “I Can’t Sleep—A Boring Podcast,” into his family’s livelihood since being laid off in January.

Boster’s episodes have been downloaded about 10 million times across various platforms, and he doesn’t even have to write his own material. He slowly reads entire Wikipedia entries. Recent gripping subjects include Seahorse, Utility Pole, Beard, Pasta and Automated Teller Machine.

“Often for listeners,” he says, “the challenge is: Can I stay awake for a whole episode?”

Boster has 54 episode requests pending, some of which—reading about skeletons, for example—are a hard pass.

That is probably wise. Boster says his majority-female audience uses the podcasts as much for stress management as for sleep.

Shelly Cox, a retired magazine editor from Virginia, has restless legs syndrome and often wakes up in the middle of the night during her travels around North America with her husband in their Airstream recreational vehicle. Finding herself in a strange campsite is a very lonely feeling, she says, and she turns to the podcast “Sleep With Me,” which bills itself as “bedtime stories to help grownups fall asleep.”

“It is like being next to a very good friend at a time of need,” she says.

Adult bedtime stories, the most common technique for putting people at ease, require the right reader, such as Tom Jones, a 30-year-old Englishman who has long been told he has a distinctive voice.

“People would say, ‘You have quite the monotone.’ Now I take it as a compliment.”

. . . .

The business of sending listeners to la-la land is no sleepy corner of commerce. Executives at Audible, an Amazon subsidiary and leading U.S. audiobook platform, noticed many customers were listening to its books with a sleep timer and launched its “Sleep Collection” four years ago, featuring bedtime tales read by stars including Brian Cox, Eva Longoria and Keke Palmer.

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal (Sorry if you encounter a paywall)

PG inspected a handful of sites with soporific qualities. Here are a handful he found interesting, but not very. Note that each of these videos is quite long and, per their purpose, the way they start out is pretty much the way they sound all the way to the end.

First is The Most Boring Video Ever Made