Why Podcast Listening Is Such An Intimate Experience

 There are numerous reasons why listening to podcasts is an intimate experience. Even companies that sell ads on podcasts find, in their research, that podcast fans have a special bond with podcasters. That's one reason why host-read ads resonate so well with listeners.

With podcasting, as with music, you can create your audio world with sound becoming your personal valet. No one knows what you're listening to unless you share that information. Listening to a podcast and music is indeed a much different experience. Music can facilitate a daydream, convey a mood you want to reproduce, or you can revel in the emotional cloth that music can provide.

Listening to a podcast offers a more intellectual, thoughtful, emotional, and informative experience. 

You can think, reflect, laugh, scoff, snicker, scream, doubt, and believe. 

For example, when I work in my garden a few times a week, The Daily with Michael Barbaro is my constant companion. If I'm driving in the evening, APM Marketplace rides with me in my Hyundai. I don't blast the speakers or dial up the bass to vibrate the interior to show off to others that I'm listening to music. Instead, I bath myself in the carefully considered words of Kai Ryssdal on Marketplace. 

When I walk five miles almost every day (no walking in the rain or in extreme temperatures over 90 degrees and under 10 degrees), I can't wait to cycle through my favorite podcasts. As I move past houses in my neighborhood, I am treated to the words of Sean Rameswaram from Today, Explained or the true-crime podcast The Murder Sheet.

When people listen to music, there are often those visual cues they cannot help but display. A tap, tap, tap of your feet. A simulation of your hands playing drums on your thighs. A sway of your hips or a bob of your head. 

The message to the outside world is clear.

"I'm listening to some great music, everyone."

When listening to a podcast like Slate's Hit Parade, it's just me and host Chris Molanphy geeking out the Billboard charts. Or Ken Rudin on The Political Junkie, giving me an insight into famous past events in political history.

A great podcast can capture your attention, such as Decoder Ring with Willa Paskin. You can be so focused on the words and sounds in the podcast and still be concentrating on cleaning the house, washing the car, cleaning out your closet, or even packing orders for your small business.

Listening to a podcast is an intimate experience between you, your ears, and the podcast host and guests. It's like inviting these people into your brain. They stay for a while, maybe an hour, and then leave you with some info, a few insights, a kernel of a new idea, a funny story, a tale of woe, or the sense that the wrong person was convicted.  

So the next time, you carefully insert your earbuds, use your podcast app to decide upon a podcast, think about the act of allowing another person to enter your ears.

I can't speak for you, but I'm selective about who enters my ears. It's a sacred space. 

That's the weird part about video podcasts on YouTube. There's nothing wrong with them, and for some, the video component is a necessary part of their media consumption choice. Yet, once a podcast is on a video screen, it's as if the podcast loses that sense of intimacy and the "I only have ears for you" quality. 

Somehow, media, in its myriad formats, attaches to our daily routines in unique ways on a personal and social level. A movie theater, of course, is a social experience with moviegoers keying off the reactions of the people seated near them -- laughter, sadness, fright, and shock -- like a virus that moves from person to person, unseen but powerful. 

Radio has always had a duality about it. On one hand, radio was a family experience before television when the family would sit around the Zenith Upright Radio and listen to Captain Midnight, Jack Benny, or The Shadow. In the next generation, radio was the primary source for popular rock n' roll music and was often a communal listening experience with dancing its complimentary physical activity, or perhaps a more intimate consensual contact "under the boardwalk."

Yet, radio has been slowly fenced off and restricted to commuting in a vehicle, so it's become more of a personal activity. Preset radio buttons are a touch away for us, and they are just for us. 

A favorite warning when someone borrows our car.

"Do not, under any circumstances, change my radio presets."

Since its arrival in the late 40s, television has always been a communal experience, especially when a family had only one television set. Of course, sometimes only one family in a neighborhood had a TV in the early days of TV in the 50s. Back then, TV was indeed a neighborhood bonding event. 

Today, streaming TV, phones and tablets that allow for TV viewing have, to a large extent, repurposed TV viewing as a more personal experience. Today, people are forever looking at their phone screens. 

In a feat of technological synchronicity, the development of headphones and wireless earbuds has now walled off TV viewing from the communal to the solitary.

Even music has lost some of that pop-cultural ambiance as the current generation retreats to AirPods and its other branded cousins. Music, to a large extent, isn't in the air anymore. Just in our ears. What we listen to doesn't bring us together anymore, as much as it splits us apart.

Listening to a podcast is still a personal act. A one-person play. A deep connection between our ears and the images, ideas, thoughts, and concepts those sounds create. 

Photo by Mikhail Nilov

When listening to a podcast, it isn't what enters your ears that is as important as what travels from your ears to your brain.

As TV psychologist from the 1970s, Dr. Joyce Brothers, once said, "Real intimacy is only possible to the degree that we can be honest about what we are doing and feeling." 

Somehow, you're never alone when listening to a podcast. The podcaster's voice isn't like the hollow camaraderie or vicious anonymity that comes from social media. 

Actor Amy Poehler once said, "Find a group of people who challenge and inspire you; spend a lot of time with them, and it will change your life."

For me, those people include Stephen Dubner Freakonomics, Laur Hesse Fisher TIL Climate, Ashley Hamer Taboo Science, Seraphina Malina-Derben Seraphina Speaks, Tim Harford Cautionary Tales, Matt Gilhooly The Life Shift, Rita Richa Bippity Boppity Business, Jenn Trepeck Salad With A Side Of Fries, Shakar Vedantam Hidden Brain, and many more.

How about You?