I’ve been listening to people talk my entire life. And if I could take away one bite of wisdom from all of the words I’ve heard – big and small and misused and made-up and “fuck” – it’s that most people suck at talking. But this means more than being a trembler or a yapper or an ever-whisperer (albeit these three all sort of suck). The people who suck at talking suffer from something a simple volume tweak cannot cure – and that is being boring – and listening becomes merely hearing when shit gets boring. Any grade-school runt can tell you that. Actually, any person of any age ever can tell you that. So, sometime during high school, I was introduced to the podcast – recorded audio of people who usually don’t suck at talking doing just that: talking and not sucking at it. The podcast breathed new life into my dread for man, a dread that fellow human beings can know all of these words yet have no clue how to use them. Unselfish, I know. It seemed fitting to have, at our oily fingertips, these last bastions of good talking when, as far as I can tell, the world couldn’t relegate good talking any further.
I, for instance, recently went through an entire day almost without saying a word to anyone. Why? Because Jony Ive and some gangling dude named Jobs stayed up all night talking about fucking corners. But, they did talk and they did care. The podcast made me care, finally.
Ed Catmull, current president of Pixar, once said, on a podcast, “Artists learn to see.” This is an abstract maxim you’d expect from a creative who even wrote a book called, “Creativity, Inc.” What his words don’t explain is what defines an artist, and I contend that, whatever his or my definition is, good speakers are artists. If, say, an artist is deemed an artist since they can make something that relatively few people can make, then good talkers, too, are artists because many people suck at it. Sure, but what do these talkers “see” that we can’t? They see the value in listening. Be it “WTF!” ’s Marc Maron asking Robin Williams about cocaine and depression, or “Comedy Bang Bang!” ’s Scott Aukerman riffing with Paul F. Tompkins like they were never taught anything else, what the top players in the podcast universe do is listen first, build second.
There was a time before Spotify and playlists of playlists, when people driving to work or ensconced in a sofa listened to the radio. That you couldn’t choose your next track or rewind back to the refrain meant that you, sitting there, had to shut up and listen. Or, maybe not listen, but either way, it humbled you to concede that the person singing or talking is, at some level, smarter than you. Podcasts deliver that same old-fashioned humility, a principle knows nothing of.
I’m not telling you to download all 600-odd episodes of “WTF!” because that would take you a year and, plus, I hate when people tell me to “download” something. But here I am, nursing my double-ristretto cortado in a library full of Ph.D candidate dorks, telling you to download a podcast and see how it feels. I don’t buy into the “I don’t have time” saw because, well, it’s not true and that makes you a big fat liar. And even if podding doesn’t cleanse you of your trembling, yapping, whispering ways, fret not because if you’re doing any of those, at least you’re trying.