Podcasts could spark a new era of lighting

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the attraction of interview podcasts is their DIY nature. It is a return to the intellectual imitation that marked the birth of the public. But it is of a completely different scale and scope. The group that listens to intellectual conversations for hours each week these days numbers in the millions. And many of them live, like my friends from high school, in places where it would have been impossible to listen to an intellectual conversation just 15 years ago.

Anecdotally, people pick up new behaviors and mental models from the conversations they overhear. They are mimicking, at least on a superficial level, the strategies intellectuals use when faced with difficult questions in real time (“Are you saying…”, “Let me rephrase that question”, “There are several sub-questions here; let me start with …”). They absorb the tone that successful people use to establish a casual relationship with someone they just met. Podcast listeners also hear, over and over again, how someone good at asking questions provides context for someone else to be interesting.

We could also be detecting dysfunctional patterns. Conveying these thoughts to my village friends, they played the Devil’s lawyer (saying the phrase in English). One of them noted that he felt they were getting worse when taking turns speaking, which could be a pattern picked up by listening to people doing monologues while the podcast host does all the talking work.

As we consider the impact of the podcast phenomenon on a global scale, it’s intriguing to reflect on where the trend could take us. The French Revolution, the founding of the United States, industrialization, the growth of science: these trends and events can be analyzed as the Republic of Letters attempting to remake the world in its image: cosmopolitan, skeptical of received authority, and rational. .

Can the values, ideas and norms being spread through DIY broadcasting and parasocial imitation today also shape the world? It is tempting to be dismissive of such ideas. For every person who listens to an eight-hour highbrow podcast, there are 10 who listen to gossip and entertainment.

But this was also true in the early modern age. When Erasmus sat on horseback to draw letters, it didn’t look like much. He was just talking to his friends, and what difference can a few old-time nerds make? The world around them was descending towards witch hunts and religious wars. The budding public, listening to intellectual conversations, was a rounding error in population statistics. However, we now live in the world that they wrote to exist.

We should not underestimate the power of social learning and what can happen when you improve the social environment accessible to intellectually curious people. Podcasts are an experiment in expanding access to specific types of intellectual conversation on a scale that has never been attempted before. People in rural Sweden are listening, as are millions in India, Nigeria, Brazil and other areas who until recently had no access to the conversations and thought patterns at American research institutions or Silicon Valley startups. . As they start to identify with these ways of being through parasocial relationships, as they start to talk like this, as they start companies and blogs and engage in conversations about nuclear fusion or AI alignment or Georgist economics, what will happen then?