Quit podcasts
Matt Anderson has made that phrase something of a personal slogan. Among the many controversial things he’s written—he’s a controversialist, after all—it may be the most controversial. We like our shows in the age of Peak TV. And what he wants to do is take them away.
Okay, not exactly. But he thinks you—all of us—would be better off if we canceled our Netflix subscriptions. For the obvious reasons: Netflix is a candy bar, a sedative, a numbing device by which we pass the time by doing nothing especially worthwhile at all. It turns out that’s true not only of Netflix but of the so-called Golden Age of TV as a whole. It’s not that there are no good TV shows. It’s that, in almost every circumstance, there are dozens of better things you could be doing with your time. (You might be inclined to resist this claim, but in your heart you know it’s inarguable.) Add to that the fact that watching Prestige TV has become, in the last dozen years, a vaguely moralized social obligation for a certain subset of upper-middle class white-collar professionals, and perhaps Matt is right that Christians not only may but should quit Netflix.
Point taken. Now allow me to swap out a different activity for your quitting consideration.
Podcasts.
Podcasts, as you well know, are the new Prestige TV. They’re ubiquitous. Not only does everyone have a favorite podcast. Everyone has a podcast, i.e., hosts one of their own. Or is starting one. Or is planning to. Or has an idea for one. They just need to get the equipment and line up some guests . . .
I live and work right next to a college campus. If you see someone walking on campus and that person is under 40 and alone, almost certainly she has air pods in her ears, and chances are those air pods are playing a podcast. (Maybe music. Maybe.) What is the podcast? Who knows? There are literally millions today, on every topic under the sun. “Have you listened to [X] podcast?” is the new “Have you seen the latest episode of [X]?” Just last month our pediatrician asked me, in the middle of a check-up for one of our kids, given my job, whether I was listening to the Mars Hill podcast. Alas, I had to say no.
Now, this post is two-thirds troll, one-third sincere. I’ve been listening to podcasts for nearly 15 years. My first was Bill Simmons’ old pod for ESPN, whose first episode dropped while I was living in an apartment in Tomsk, Russia, early in the summer of 2007. I’ve been listening to Simmons off and on ever since. My podroll has increased as I’ve aged, and some of my typical listens are among the usual suspects: Ezra Klein, The Argument, Zach Lowe, The Watch, The Rewatchables, Know Your Enemy, LR&C, Tyler Cowen, Mere Fidelity, The Editors, a few others here and there. Washing the dishes or cleaning the house, it’s a pleasure to listen to these folks talk about sports and entertainment and news and politics and theology. It’s background noise, their voices become like those of friends, and occasionally you even learn things.
So unlike the scourge of Prestige TV—which is little more than a Trojan horse for reinforcing the single greatest collective habitual addiction besetting our society for nearly a century—podcasts aren’t All Bad, nor are their benefits mainly a function of rationalization and self-justification. I’m not worried about them in the same way.
Having said that. Let me suggest a few reasons why you ought to be a little more skeptical of them. So as to decrease your podcasting, and maybe even to quit it.
First, podcasts are filler. They’re aural wallpaper. They’re something to have on in the background while you do something else, something that requires your actual focus and attention. If that’s true, can they really be that substantial? Aren’t they, as often as not, little more than snack food for the ears?
Second, if you really want to listen to something (say, on a road trip or a long walk or while working out), why not listen to an audiobook? Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, the book will be worth your time—a four-course meal—in a way the Cheetos-posing-as-Michelin-starred-podcast will not. You could buy audiobooks or sign up for Audible, as a way to patronize authors, or you could use Overdrive or Libby. You have more or less every great work of literature and prose in the English language available to listen to for free; sometimes the work was composed with the express purpose of hearing it read aloud, rather than reading words on a page. Why not give it a try?
Third, those first two points suppose it’s not a problem, us walking around incessantly filling our ears with the voices of others, thus blocking out the noises—and silences—of the real world. Isn’t it a problem, though, this anxious need to fill even the smallest of snatches of time with meaningful noise, lest we be oppressed by the stillness and quietness (or, if you’re in a big city, the parading loudness) of life? Or perhaps we feel anxious to Do Something Productive with our time: If our attention can manage it, surely we Ought To Be Learning/Listening/Thinking? Nonsense. If to cook is to pray, so is every other daily “mindless” habitual activity that doesn’t demand the totality of our attention. Such activity may, in fact, permit our attention to be at ease, or to meditate on other matters, or to examine our days, or to wander as it pleases. Or, as the case may be, to choke on emotions we’d rather not address, indeed would rather numb and sedate and repress through unremitting distraction. Perhaps podcasts are a kind of noise pollution but on an individual level, self-chosen rather than imposed from without. We just have to refuse the urge to put the pods in and press play.
Fourth, podcasts almost invariably trade on the new, the latest, the exclusive-breaking-this-just-in-ness of our forgetful presentist age. In this they’re analogous to Twitter: an infinite scroll, not for the eyes, but for the ears. Doubtless some people listen to podcasts while scrolling Twitter. (The horror!) The podcasts play on, world without end, one blending into another, until you forget where one begins and one ends. Of all the podcasts you’ve ever listened to—and I’ve surely listened to thousands—how many discrete episodes can you point to, from memory, and say, “That one, right there, was significant, a meaningful and substantive and life-giving episode”? I’m not saying you couldn’t pick out a few. I’m suggesting the batting average will be very low. Again, like remembering individual tweets. That’s why podcasts are so disposable. The moment they lose their immediate relevance, they are cast aside into the dustbin of history. It’s what makes writers who become podcasters so sad. Books and essays and columns stand the test of time. Pods do not. Bill Simmons, whom I referenced earlier, stopped writing five or six years ago. He likes to say his fingers stopped working. The truth is, a combination of market inefficiency plus the convenience of podcasting meant taking the time to draft and revise and draft and revise, under an editor’s watchful eye, was less convenient and more time-demanding than hopping onto a podcast seconds after a game ended—plus advertisers are willing to pay for that in a way they don’t for individual columns. So a writer who came onto the scene and made a name for himself because of his writing simply ceased to practice his craft. That’s something to lament. Beyond that individual case, though, it’s a parable for our time. And Simmons is someone with an audience in the millions. Yet his thousands upon thousands of podcasts from the last decade will never be listened to a second time, now or in the future. They might as well be lit on fire ten days after going online. The same goes for politics podcasts. They’re talk radio, only rarefied and highbrow. But they have the same shelf life. And they partake of the selfsame contemporary obsession with The New that all people of good will, but certainly Christians (and Jews and Muslims), should repudiate in all its forms. Go read Rolf Dobelli’s Stop Reading the News and you’ll realize just how unimportant—in general and to your own daily life—“keeping up with the news” is. That goes for politics and sports and entertainment (but I repeat myself) as much as for anything else. Stop reading the news translates to stop listening to the news, which I will gloss here as stop listening to podcasts devoted to The New.
Fifth, podcasts have increasingly become niche and personalized, as so much in our digital economy has. You, the individual consumer-listener, pay the individual content-maker/podcaster, perhaps become a Patreon supporter, and thereby receive Exclusive Access and Personal Benefits and other just-for-you paid-for goods and services. Am I the only one who finds all of this ever so slightly weird, even gross? I don’t begrudge anyone hustling to do their thing or to find an audience, precisely outside of the decaying and desiccated institutions that act as gatekeepers today. But there’s something icky about it nonetheless. In the same way that news-watchers can exist in entirely different moral and epistemic universes—one presided over and mediated by Fox News, the other by MSNBC—so podcast-listeners curate their own little private aural worlds with nary a glance at or interruption from another. It doesn’t help that this ecosystem (or ecosphere?) overlaps substantially with the gig-cum-influencer economy, where fame and fortune are always one viral moment away, for anyone and everyone. We’re all always already potentially (in)famous and affluent, if only the digital stars will align. We try to nudge those stars by flooding the market with our content, a sort of astrology or spell-conjuring with ones and zeroes, or in this case, “Thanks for following; while you’re here, check out my SoundCloud.”
In any case, those are at least some of the reasons for increasing your skepticism quotient in this matter. More than a slightly more skeptical eye, though, consider whether you ought to go all the way. For there’s a solution lying close to hand.
Quit podcasts.
