Reason # 17: Why I Love Podcasts

 Today I’m going to write about reason # 17 why I love podcasts. I will get around to expounding on reasons 1 to 16 at a later date. 

I focused on reason number 17  because of my car. The interior of my 2018 Hyundai Sonata looks like the inside of a dumpster left in the driveway of a condemned house. 

I decided it that I was going to clean the car so that it could pass the most scrupulous inspection. First I prepared all of my cleaning materials. Windex, rags, ArmorAll, and a large trash bag. Here’s the important part. I put in my ear buds, got out my phone and turned on a podcast. I had a plan. I started with the Maintenance Phase podcast with an episode on fat camps and was going to move to Freakonomics with an episode on too much positivity and then finally head over to the Unexplained Podcast for a heavy podcast on cosmology and the end of the universe. 

I saved that podcast for last because if the universe was going to end, I didn’t mind heading into oblivion with a messy car.

The entire cleaning or more accurately cleansing process of the interior of my car car took about two hours. During that time I listened to those three podcasts. Normally without the reassuring and informative voices of those podcasts in my ears, cleaning the car would have been torture. Instead, two hours went by so fast I actually had to look back into my car to confirm that it was clean - that I hadn’t missed anything.

And so this entire cleaning exercise shows me that listening to podcasts can make any activity tolerable. 

Well, maybe not doing your taxes. 

Podcasting because of its very nature enables people to multi task, although, in reality, there is no such thing. 

But it can make a difficult task easier by allowing your brain to comfort itself inside the aural security blanket of a podcast. Now I have to admit I wouldn’t want my surgeon operating on me while listening to Joe Rogan or any other podcast. Music seems to fit the bill as background for tasks that require a tremendous amount of concentration. Of course cleaning the interior of my car is not a brain heavy task. So I had neurons leftover in order to enjoy the three podcasts that I listened to.

Is this ability to perform other tasks and listen to podcasts the secret to its success? The answer is no. Sure podcasts make it easy to endure an odious commute either in your car or on mass transit or some task at home you’ve avoided it for the last six months. But podcasts stand alone and can stand up to being the solitary origin of your entertainment without the distraction of activity.

So to wrap up, I was able to in a few hours clean the interior of my car so it’s now presentable to other human beings all the while enjoying informative and entertaining podcasts.

 Next week reason number 11.  

What, you were expecting numerical order?