september 2019 / 21‘Some are
like vast
volumes
of short
stories, to
be dipped in
and out of.
Some are
one-timers,
ships that
pod in the
night’
gq. co. zaa whole New York Times, for god’s sake!’
‘Twenty times?’ queries his friend Jeff.
‘Hey, buddy,’ says Larry, indignant, ‘when you’re
peeing all over your shoe, I’m learning something.’
Which is basically the way I’ve always felt about
podcasts. Hey, buddy, while you’re staring into space
on this train or scanning the vegetable aisle in that
shop, I’m learning something.
And then, one day, I listened to Pod Save America
when I wasn’t on the loo and I swear – I swear – I felt
that I needed to go. Fair to say, that right there was
when I worried I was listening to too many podcasts.
Podcasts are funny aren’t they? They’re not radio shows,
they’re not books, but are somehow a curious mixture of
the two – at once startlingly intimate and oddly invasive.
I know no other medium, for instance, that will talk me
through the grizzly details of a coroner’s report while I’m
picking out ingredients for my lunchtime salad.
It’s hard to say when we, collectively, started to
experience podcast fever, but two events are widely
thought of as key. The first Apple baking in a dedicated
podcasts app in the iPhone OS in 2012, the second
was Serial, the 2014 true-crime podcast that reminded
people such things as podcasts exist.
Currently, we’re told, we’re in a podcast gold rush.
The likes of Malcolm Gladwell has co-founded Pushkin
Industries, which will feature podcasts from himself and
Michael Lewis, while the likes of Luminary now aims
to sell a subscription service for podcasts in the style of
Spotify. Spotify itself, meanwhile, has spent hundreds of
millions this year alone hoovering up podcast companies
such as Gimlet Media. Currently, almost a billion people
listen to at least one podcast per month.
But within this, something else has happened: the
rise of the podcast “super listener”, who consumes twice
as many podcasts as the average listener and prefers
“in-depth” content rather than chat. I can’t tell you how
depressing it is to realise I am one.
Get this: a recent episode of Reply All – a show that
investigates curious Internet and tech phenomena,
which, yes, I subscribe to – saw the hosts investigate the
case of a person who had bought a new car specifically
because the stereo was ideal to play podcasts, yet the
stereo refused to play his favourite one, 99% Invisible,
about the impact of design on our world.
Two things struck me.
One: that’s my favourite
podcast. And two: the guy
in question listened to so
many podcasts his app
told him he has spent, in
total, 133 days listening to
them. One hundred and
thirty-three days!
But the worst part
about this is that he also
hosts a podcast. I don’t
know what counts as
“peak podcast”, but I’ll
take a wild swing that
podcasts about podcast
addicts who also run
podcasts that try to help
them listen to one more
podcast must be up there.
Can any of this be
good for my brain? The
answer, as it often does for
me, comes via a podcast.
A 2016 episode of the
Freakonomics podcast,
which I subscribe to, was
titled “This Is Your Brain
On Podcasts” and looked
at exactly what effect
a podcast has on you. Andit turned out, way more
than anyone suspected.
They studied people
listen to The Moth podcast
(let me shock you: I’m
a subscriber) in an MRI
machine and they found
every part of the brain
lit up: not just the parts
that process sound and
language, but numbers
and maths, too. As Jack
Gallant, a computational
and cognitive
neuroscientist, put it: ‘It
makes your brain hum.’
And yet this wasn’t
altogether seen as a good
thing. Your brain needs
time to process all that
information the podcast
found – to process it and
form new ideas based
on it, and that only
comes by letting it do
nothing at all. In short:
all the benefits that come
with mindfulness.
Happily,though,there’s
a podcastforthat.- Stuart McGurk