On Podcasts and Friendship
Last August a few friends and I went to a Yankees/Red Sox game in the Bronx. Such outings have become less frequent over the years, our care-free 20s giving way to the family, work and childcare obligations of our 30s. We bought four tickets for the second game of a Saturday day/night double-header, with plans to arrive early and explore the city beforehand.
The Saturday of, one of the four dropped out – a work casualty – but we slotted in a replacement. Next man up, as the sports canon declares, and off we went.
What we did that afternoon, and the game itself, are actually irrelevant to this broader story.
Approaching midnight, after the game had ended and we shuffled to the train back north, thunderstorms rolled into the area. And less than ten minutes into the ride, the train stopped and the lights came on, accompanied by a downbeat engineer: “I’m sorry ladies and gentlemen, due to storms in the area, track signaling has been rendered inoperable and our crews are working to get back in motion.” Or some such issue. I was immediately thankful for the cold bottles of water I’d bought from the post-game street hawkers.
The bad news announced, the four of us – seated 2×2 across from each other – exchanged a few expected remarks (yes, this did indeed suck) but a conversation failed to spark. Whether tired from the day or unwilling to face this setback head-on, we sat in silence. To my left, one friend pulled out his phone and attached a pair of white headphones. He opened his podcast player – The Rewatchables – and curled towards the window. I made conversation with a group of teens across the aisle until they slid back into their own world of esoteric references that I’d never fully understand.
And then we made it home, eventually. That’s it, that’s the whole story.
You were right to expect more, but I’d like to think that anecdote segues nicely into the main question of this post: are we replacing, or maybe supplementing, our friendships with podcasts?
I was an early podcast adopter and have been listening regularly since 2008. Over that time, I’ve sampled dozens of podcasts and have gradually settled into a regular rhythm. I’ve purposely used “regular” twice, because it’s true: over the last decade-plus, I’ve listened to a podcast on more days than not. Suffice to say, episode by episode, that adds up to a lot of time, even if it’s time I’m also spending in the car or cleaning my apartment.
I’ll use one of my favorite shows as an example: Stuff You Should Know. One of the podcasting OGs, SYSK has been around since the beginning, and I’ve listened to nearly all of their episodes. As of my approximate counting, I’ve listened to about 1,425 episodes out of an available 1,500.
So let’s do some quick math:
1,425 episodes, averaging 40 minutes each, total about 950 hours. Divided by 24 hours per day, that amounts to more than 39-and-a-half days. Nearly 40 days and 40 nights, without stopping; an unfathomable listening binge.
I’m embarrassed to admit, but the following statement is 100% accurate: I’ve spent more time with Josh and Chuck, the hosts of SYSK, than most people I would consider close to me.
Why is this the case? How did this happen?
At their best, podcasts deliver an enhanced version of your friends; or, if we look at ourselves long enough, the friends we sometimes wished we had. Friends who better overlap with our own personal interests and have an uncanny success rate for telling great stories.
The quality of the host(s) and their banter seems like a better predictor of podcast success than the topic of discussion itself, especially for general interest subjects. I’ll again turn the microscope on myself: I’m at the point now where I spend more time listening to NBA podcasts than I do actually watching the games. If you even suggested that to me as a possibility five years ago, I would’ve laughed at you. And I would’ve been wrong.
As we know first-hand, listening to a podcast is a very controlled, user-directed experience. You are the M.C., enabled by digital tools to speed up the conversation, skip ahead if you want, or pause and save it for later. Imagine if we did this to our actual friends. We wouldn’t maintain many for long.
In that way, podcasts are a perfect medium for individual content consumption: a one-way, on-demand conversation on practically any topic you want. I am an unabashed lover of them. But do I perhaps love them too much, at the expense of my real-world relationships? Probably.
Those SYSK consumption numbers from earlier feel a little different now, huh? Like I alluded to in the introduction, it’s not like I’m spending a lot of time with my friends these days, COVID or not. Each year that passes, we spend less and less time with each other, which is a statement of fact, not judgement. There are only so many hours in the day after all.
And I understand it too, the insidious path of least resistance: if you have 30 minutes of free time, it’s just easier to listen to a podcast than to call one of your friends, because if you don’t talk to your friends regularly, it’s hard to have a “real” conversation without spending the whole time catching up at the surface level – almost like having the conversation before the conversation. Instead you could tune in and drop out with engaging audio personalities who are ready and willing to discuss every topic under the sun. And they ask nothing of you in return other than sitting through the occasional SquareSpace ad.
A lot has been written about how self-reported loneliness continues to creep up in across the American population. Sometimes I wonder if the numbers would actually be worse if podcasts weren’t as ubiquitous as they’ve become, since they’re effectively a form of social interaction in portable, capsule form. Healthy social interaction? Not really, but maybe it’s something, the feeling of being part of a larger community.
This much is true: friendships and true connections are hard and listening to podcasts is easy. And I’m as guilty as anyone of, for example, fiddling with the audio in the car to avoid talking to the person next to me. I want to be more mindful of that behavior – I won’t always make the right choice and engage, but I need to be aware that I’m doing it (and of the negative externalities, like an atrophying relationship.) To think is has no impact is naïve.
I think back to my friend on the train, the one who brought his headphones. You know what’s crazy? I couldn’t help but think, when he pulled them out of his pocket, how good of an idea it was, that I should’ve thought ahead too. And if I could have, I would’ve joined him in an auditory soma state instead of talking to him about the experience happening in front of us. Two friends, sitting next to each other on a train, choosing to listen to other people we’d never be this close to.