Will Podcasts Save You From Yourself?
On the deafening strata of noise, the Fairness Doctrine, shock jock radio, and why you can't stop
It’s a clear day at the edge of spring, you have the day off from work (you work from home, you work from your laptop, so it feels like any other day) and you’ve decided to listen to a podcast as you clean your studio apartment. You’ll multitask in other words. You’ll get an education, be entertained, drown out the feigned cruelty of silence once more, the gasping void of time settling in on itself, the witless panic that pesters you through this delay of boredom. You used to listen to music to drown out these demons. All the fuss you made about your favorite genres and bands and their best eras was a trivializing coverup for the real reason you turned up the radio or carried with you three-ring binders bulging with your best mixed cd’s: it was to smother the constant horrors of being a thinking subject that can’t turn off the inner dialogue of a maundering madman, the deafening strata of other noise. You send in the fire brigade and all their sirens and commotion into your head to divert the attention to itself. That’s what you realize whenever you get stoned—that the pointless flaring deltas of thought are no more sane or literate than the stuff that schizophrenics say when screaming at palm trees. Your thoughts are usually far worse than that, because at least the things that erupt from a schizophrenic’s mouth are interesting. They’re funny and cruel and violent and sad and vulnerable. The vast majority of your thoughts are dull and idle gossip, impotent musings of bygones and dogmas, they usually sound more like a child talking to their invisible friends while playing alone.
But why did this asset of language decide to evolve the way it did? Chomsky famously claims we developed language not as a means to communicate with one another, but rather, more importantly as a means to communicate with ourselves, to process instincts and ideational impulses into a more direct narrative that we’ll convince ourselves this is the way it is. In other words, to talk to ourselves. It used to be simple, in our Edenic infancy, sniffing at the pollen-choked air, listening to those unseen currents of sky, spending a lifetime mostly in silence. It would be considered extreme stoicism today, some antisocial Aspergers type of thing, a loner who will never be invited to your party. But when was the last time you said something really important? Have you ever? If you had a printed transcript of today’s conversations you had, it would read like the worst movie script ever written. The majority of spoken language is disposable rapture, honking queefs of unimportance, completely useless white noise. But here we are, gossiping our way towards death, talking about those petty bitches you just had bottomless mimosas with, doing your best reenactment of reality tv.
We used to be silent when alone, sifting through the private dramaturges in your head, analyzing the values of what you really thought. Now, we listen to podcasts, endless chatter from the self-appointed icons of deserving opinions. There are so many though. Which one will it be, you wonder, scrolling through the spinning rolodex of intellectual gore. Should you listen to Sam Harris calmly put you to sleep as he talks about the potential horrors of AI, or why freewill is illusory, or why Muslims are mostly terrorists. Or Joe Rogan talk for unnumbered hours while jacked on steroids and Alpha Brain telling Jordan Peterson why he should try cold plunge, or a sensory deprivation tank, or why he agrees that trans athletes are ruining politics. Hm, not quite, you think. Every comedian on earth has a podcast now, so maybe you pick one of them at random, they have the same tonal veneer as the radio show zoos, with the myriad sound boards and fart machines they use to interrupt each other or prank call unsuspecting strangers. Maybe just a nice objective center-left take from The New York Times, The Daily, to understand what’s going on in the world in a rational manner. God no. Or maybe you’ll finally try one of those satirical leftwing podcasts your male friend with the tangled man bun like a winterized rat’s nest keeps going on about. You know about the dominant ones, and are at least peripherally aware that there is a deafening culture industry cascading around you—the endless supply of true crime podcasts, where producers can somehow take a simple domestic crime of a husband killing his wife in the bathroom and tease it out over nine episodes and twelve hours, and you’re left dumbly suspicious that you were just conned, that you won’t get those hours back, that your life is accelerating towards the end and you’re spending it on repackaged tabloids. But you drive a lot, so it makes sense to keep listening to something. You don’t want strangers talking to you on the subway, so you pop in your Airpods, and let these other strangers talk to you. You select the one where drunk friends yell inside jokes to each other for two hours, and you close your eyes, taking these serene moments for yourself before walking into work. You don’t want to talk to your husband for the full duration of the road trip, so you make him listen to the accompanying Love is Blind podcast. Every television series now has an official accompanying podcast. Then there are all the fan podcasts discussing the show. You consume the world through a series of screens, projecting the dramaturgy of heroes and villains onto the meaningless void you swim in, and hide in it even more by listening to people unpack it, analyze the tapestries of clues with their fine-toothed combs. But with podcasts, the screens are now in your ears.
There’s over three million podcasts, with over 150 million podcast episodes. When the pandemic hit, a million people had the same epiphany, this aural enlightenment beamed into your skull: I should start a podcast. I have things to opine about. People need to listen to me. You only pay attention to the big ones, the ones your friends recommend, the ones Spotify recommends—which is the same thing.
Of course, this didn’t just happen, suddenly out of nowhere. All these millions of polemicists of great ideas didn’t just roll out of bed in their underwear and decide that they could speak for a living, and people would become Patreon subscribers en masse or they’d humorously read ads for Athletic Greens or Blue Chew boner pills. The groundwork for impassioned cutthroat amateurs came out of the shock jock talk radio world, when the FCC revoked the Fairness Doctrine in 1987. The Fairness Doctrine had required radio stations to present politics in a manner that fairly presented differing views. This is of course an innately flawed mandate—there’s no clearly defined set of differing views on any given subject, with such a vagueness and nuance that couldn’t be effectively enforced anyways. I don’t even know if such a mandate is productive—who’s to say what the different views are, and if all those views actually were presented fairly, not to mention it teeters on the edge of a manufactured consent type of narrative. But when the Fairness Doctrine was revoked, the general patina of political civility almost instantly went off the rockers. People like Rush Limbaugh rose to fame, saying anything he wanted with his unique imbecilic fury, his quintessential sneering American obesity, his hatred of drug culture while also addicted to drugs. But he captured Howard Beale’s I’m-mad-as-hell-and-I’m-not-going-to-take-it-anymore sentiment. He struck a nerve that showed we weren’t just going to constructively debate our way to a consensus. The whole point is to not reach consensus.
Matt Taibbi has mentioned several times that during the last election cycle, the American public had an all-time distrust in mainstream media, while simultaneously ratings were at an all-time high, meaning that viewers know they’re being lied to, or at least manipulated, but they keep watching because they want to be entertained, they wanted to be charged with their own bedlams of revolt. We’re addicted. Rush Limbaugh paved the road for the more maverick weirdos like Alex Jones, who took the hysteria much further, and that too struck a nerve—the paranoids and the freaks had their diviner and oracle, a wild-eyed prophet of testosterone, the spherical brawn of a real-life Ralph Steadman caricature who says things like chemical warfare is making people gay, the New World Order is a demonic high-tech tranny made up of satanist elites, Hillary Clinton is close friends with the occultist Marina Abramovic and together they take part in dinners that include eating semen, blood and breastmilk. At least we can entertain ourselves.
Howard Stern changed everything in an entirely different way. You could be driving your eighteen wheeler across the country and listen to strippers competing in an anal ring toss. It was hilarious. As a kid in the nineties I’d wake up after my parents went to bed and watch these episodes on late night television. By achieving the popularity he did, he exposed America’s moral veneer as superficial, that we want filth and hilarity, that a new kind of church was in session. I love it.
In America’s golden age of radio, before the ubiquity of television, listeners watched the radio like a scrying stone. And they aired everything on it, from radio plays to quiz shows to variety hours, talents shows, shows for children, play-by-play sports broadcast. When Orson Welles aired a radio series of The War of the Worlds, it famously caused a mass panic because listeners thought they were listening to a real Martian invasion coming down upon them. We believe what we’re told. And we want to be listened to. We come in and out of this world in shivering panic, and new truths come bubbling up out of the new flesh.
The first newspaper was the Acta Diurna—or the Daily Acts—a daily Roman gazette, beginning in 133 BC. Newsworthy events were carved into stone and set in heavily trafficked areas. It introduced the expression “publicare et propagare”—or, “make public and propagate.” Because from the outset, the early inscribers of the text of our thought knew the whole overarching goal of the news narrative was propaganda. The famous Behistun Inscription in the Kermanshah Province of Iran is one of the earliest known examples of outright propaganda. Authored by Darius the Great, it’s a massive cuneiform inscription fifty feet tall and eighty feet wide detailing his nineteen victorious battles against imposters and their conspirators in a single year. He easily won them all because he’s the rightful king because he was chosen by the great Zoroastrian deity, Ahura Mazda. The Roman annalist and praetor Quintus Fabius Pictor, from the third century BCE, defined a style of historiography that always defended the actions of Rome, blaming wars on others, and romanticizing the conditions of life within Rome. The whole “history is written by the victors” notion as stated by Churchill, or that it’s a fable agreed upon, as stated by Napoleon, is an admission of guilt that truth is a malleable thing until it’s written in stone.
The difference in the nettling post-truth geography of today is that everyone is their own polemicist. And they’re usually an annoying one. Podcasts are of course just one installment of this. Look at you, look at what you’ve become, walking down a crowded sidewalk, with your phone’s screen pointed at you, beaming down like a red-eyed augur, live-streaming your trip to the farmer’s market, reviewing it for the two people that accidentally clicked on it thinking it was just a regular story. Or when you’re enjoying a priggishly unadulterated moment of indulgence at the cute little French bistro where you have a martini and carpaccio de boeuf while reading half a page of your book, and you feel that urge deep inside that’s as instinctual as taking a shit—omg what I’m doing right now is soo chic, let me capture it so everyone will see and heart me and even comment if I’m lucky. And so you set up a little modern still life, these placards of envy adorning the table, making sure the title of the book is slipped in there just casually enough that it looks accidental, and wait for the accolades to roll in. “Guuurl, so jelly, omg lets brunch soon asap, miss you, fingernail emoji, oh btw looooove Bell Hooks. Look at this article that you’re reading right now—I have things to say, I have earnest exclamations that you need to read, I have a moderately cynical take on the cultural totems that make up our society. I’ve read Adorno.
We are all propagandists, scrambling for the main microphone, creating a new plane where we all live now—a hyperreality, a simulation of communication. Baudrillard is the obvious one here: “Thus the media are producers not of socialization, but of exactly the opposite; of the implosion of the social in the masses. And this is only the macroscopic extension of the implosion of meaning at the microscopic level of the sign.” I’m all for the democratization of media, for letting the best ideas come to the surface, for letting people create and listen to the channels of niche interests that they want. But the media isn’t another entity anymore. We are the media, imploding the social in the masses ourselves. We are the prophets of gross illiteracy teaching ourselves how to speak, teaching you how to think.
We’ve always been these regurgitating dollies of whatever content passes through us, like a lumpy globular mass that we spit out and then scoop back into our mouths for second helpings. It’s impossible to have an original idea anymore; and that’s fine; it doesn’t have to be original to be valid. But the feedback loops of thought have cannibalized themselves. The hyperreality that Baudrillard is talking about is how every conversation is now some iteration of hey, have you seen that movie…have you seen that meme…have you listened to that podcast…nothing of this world exists anymore, even in the realm of the real. In Simulacra and Simulation, Baudrillard goes on to say that we still “expect to manipulate the medium in its form and to transform the real by using the impact of the medium as form.” Soon, it will all be transformed. Soon, this will all feel very nostalgic. You’ll get old and useless and moles will hang from your earlobes, and the younger generations will make fun of how you eat your applesauce. These days will feel nostalgic, full of rose-colored memories, because we lived here, when the world still existed, before we became digitized soundbites on a soundboard, before sex got replaced with AI porn that sucked us off, before conversations were banned and replaced with 24/7 AirPod radio, before window scenery became a projector screen, before war was only cyberwar, before all birds were slaughtered for the more pleasant stock recordings from the make-believe sky.
It’s weird. I live in this pretty quiet beach canyon outside of Los Angeles. My house is swallowed in wisteria now in bloom, and waking up in the morning and looking out through my window is like looking out at the world through a violet chandelier. There are oriels and mourning doves and a maddening number of hummingbirds that frequent outside. There’s salamanders in the creek, and you can watch the long stringy green grasses wave slowly like they have all the time in the world. And the other night I sat outside in the dark by myself for an hour or so, doing absolutely nothing, no phone, no music, no light, just listening to the chorus of frogs. And it’s embarrassing that this was somehow a novel experience as of late, that inside my door was just a regular room that had somehow become a glowing box of hypnotized gore, that I was just another addict. But that too passed. And I knew eventually I’d get bored, and I’d go back in, and I’d finish this great podcast I was listening to. You would love it.