Pod’s Honest Truth (Part 2: Why)
Podcasts make us move, listen, and connect more
This is the second part of a two-part essay. In Part 1, I explored ‘How’ to choose your player, explore new growth areas, optimize for episodes, ditch all the junk, and appoint a new board of wise advisors.
Here I’ll go deeper into the ‘Why’: to move more, become a better listener, laugh alone and listen together, and ultimately calm our minds.
I’ve even curated a podcast feed of 100 Great Podcast Episodes, some of the killer episodes that stood out for me over the years. This feed offers a ‘taster menu’ for finding new types of podcasts. Enjoy!
Move more
The third highest reason for listening to podcasts is intriguing - “To have something to listen to while doing something else” (81%). It makes a lot of sense, especially after the invention of AirPods.
Our lives are divided into roughly four or five buckets: sleep, work, chores, exercise, and enjoyment/entertainment. During the COVID lockdown period, many of us had to adjust our routines and discovered that podcasts can blur these buckets in interesting ways.
Podcasts get us moving again. Now we can walk our 10,000 daily steps while gauging the merits of effective altruism, or hustle through the vacuuming, laundry, and ironing while laughing through an episode of the BBC’s News Quiz. Or endure a 1k swim, 5k run, a 40-mile commute, or a 4,000-mile flight, lost in a heated debate about Oscar nominations. In a single afternoon, we might walk the dog, shop for groceries, mow the lawn, and cook dinner, without ever feeling alone or overwhelmed by the futility of modern existence.
Podcasts keep us company while we move or do chores, an unexpected tonic for existential doubt.
Become a better listener
My ex-partners and ex-bosses all agreed on one thing: I should work on becoming a better listener!
I couldn’t possibly comment.
We instinctively know it’s important to listen well, and the data confirms it. 64% of HR professionals identify active listening as the most critical leadership skill, and yet most managers don’t listen effectively. Active listening increases productivity and collaboration by up to 25% and reduces misunderstandings by 40%.
If you explore enough podcasts, you quickly develop a strong radar for great listening. Some (niche) podcast hosts are highly skilled interviewers, while too often the popular hosts are terrible. They ask predictable questions, interrupt guests with irrelevant stories, fail to probe and make every topic about themselves.
Perhaps they started their podcast a decade ago and attracted large audiences and, therefore, high-profile guests, but now they’re living off past glory and sucking airtime from other great interviewers.
When we curate our diet to choose great listeners, we slowly learn the craft ourselves. Here are a few interviewers I admire, and what I’ve specifically learned from each of them:
Kirsty Young - over 500 Desert Island Discs interviews, including Tom Hanks and David Beckham. Warm, witty, and nimble.
Sam Fragoso - intimate, well-researched and yet very hip, Sam gets the celebrities who don’t do interviews to open up.
Annalisa Barbieri - an authentic and vulnerable agony aunt and journalist who goes deep with professional therapists.
Sean Illing - sincere, warm, and vulnerable explorations into philosophy and psychology
Tyler Cowan - a cold open, followed by relentless, rapid-fire left-field questions often catch guests off guard, but Tyler can skillfully adapt and always gets to fresh insights
Scott Snibbe - warm, kind, and authentic spiritual explorations
Freddie Sayers - well-researched, fearless intellectual style. Tough but always fair.
Lastly, I have no evidence for this, but I suspect we are all now subjects in a giant, global, unplanned social experiment around advanced listening.
For instance, last year I went home to the UK, and reconnected with old school friends. Although we have lived very different lives, and spent so many decades in different countries and fields, it became clear that we’d been listening to the same ‘kinds of conversations’ through podcasts in recent years. During previous reunions, I had felt disconnected, but now for the first time I felt reconnected.
Perhaps slowly and gently we are all becoming better listeners.
Laugh alone
Do you ever laugh alone?
Sometimes, we find ourselves alone; sometimes, we hang out and laugh with friends and family. Rarely do we laugh alone, and if we’re caught doing so, it might raise eyebrows.
But podcasts can change that. Mysteriously, the magic spell of comedy is even more potent in our ears. The first pioneer hosts were comedians, and Joe Rogan continues to top the comedy-filled podcast charts. Julia Louis-Dreyfus is currently in second spot. Very often the most popular interview guests on ‘serious’ shows turn out to be those who manage to land meaningful points in humorous ways.
Why is this? Perhaps the medium's intimacy, where the voices seem to occupy our inner ear, this very private and intimate space, is part of the effect. Or perhaps it’s because we are fully in control of podcasts: we deliberately choose something that makes us laugh at that moment when we are ready for release.
Whatever the reason, laughter is good for us, and laughing alone can only enrich our emotional diet.
Listen together
We are social animals, and when we discover something new and valuable we often want to share it with the tribe. In a primitive sense, sharing valuable information strengthens the tribe and reconfirms our value within it.
I recommend finding a trusted podcast buddy or Whatsapp group with similar tastes: trusted partners who will listen to and comment on the episodes we send them. Sometimes, we feel strong alone, but often, we crave light-touch connection and confirmation. Did you agree with the bit about vaccines? Do you find this guy credible, or is he full of BS? Were you also touched by the final story she told?
Listening together gives us the security and meaning to keep listening and discovering alone.
Calm the mind
Initial research papers on the positive effects of podcasts on mental health look promising. A 2022 paper Why people listen: Motivations and outcomes of podcast listening suggests that podcast listeners have higher informational needs, lower belonging needs, and lower neuroticism than non-listeners. It concludes that listening to more podcasts is associated with a greater presence of meaning, and forming parasocial relationships with hosts is associated with a greater sense of relatedness.
Dozens of high-quality podcasts now focus on mental health themes, and a 2023 paper Podcasts, Mental Health, and Stigma: Exploring Motivations, Behaviors, and Attitudes Among Listeners finds associations between listening to a mental health-themed podcast, lower levels of stigmatizing attitudes, and higher mental health knowledge.
And then there’s the calming, restorative benefits of a good night’s sleep. Like me, many listeners find it easier to drift off listening to one last podcast; the more soporific, the better.
It seems that we all find different voices calming. My personal favorites are Dan Carlin, Stephen Fry, and Sam Harris. I wonder why those three - what do they have in common? They all speak in long, well-formed sentences. Perhaps it is because I essentially trust them to be consistent, without needing to know what they’ll say next.
A calm mind is the end goal of everything I do.
It’s a moving target that requires clear sources and hard work to maintain it.
A daily, intentional podcast diet helps to keep our sources clear.
J. E. Chadwick
More creative projects at jechadwick.com