Prediction: Podcasts Will Go The Way of MySpace

I half-heartedly started the Rogan/Tucker Carlson interview (conversation? Idk what you call it these days) during a lull in my day. About half an hour in to the three-hour long thing, around the mark where Tucker is going full-redpill and equating UFOs with spiritual beings, I had an epiphany--

no one cares. 

Whether its Chris Williamson or Lex Fridman in the secular world at large cross breeding with various off-the-beaten-path internet personalities (Brett Weinstein, Elon Musk, Peter Attia, etc), or Matt Fradd or Kennedy Hall or Trent Horn or Taylor Marshall in the church world, these 30 minute to 3 hour dialogues have, I think, have been around for a bit but have (imo) peaked in popularity as a medium and are now simply trying to keep the hamster wheel spinning with the long-form talkitytalk gone stale. Talking ad nauseum. Peak leisure. 

I think there's some roots here when you start tugging on the stalks. Maybe it is that I don't trust anything these days--not the government, not the hierarchy, and not even the alt-talking heads pontificating for the algorithm or doing their conservative peacock version of virtue signaling. Lots of mentors, but not many teachers. Save one, of course:

Silence

Silence does not seek an audience. It does not charge a subscription fee and does not have negative side effects. Silence makes its home in the castle of humility and awe. Silence concentrates its lifeforce in potent tinctures. It wastes nothing and holds the DNA of truth in its marrow. It is only unsettling because it is a foreigner to us. It has everything to teach us and assigns no textbook. Anyone is free to audit its class.

But instead, we continue to insist that "the truth" is in these podcasts, which we play as white noise or background music. We get mentally greased up on the fact that this "truth" is suppressed in the mainstream, and so we enjoy a kind of Gnostic Delight in listening to this secret Spotify knowledge. Or maybe it's just the cringey banter that we are most comfortable with, back and forth for twenty minutes before talking about anything of substance. We squander the supreme gift of leisure to sit, be bored, daydream, and think for ourselves.

Not that there aren't things to learn from these exchanges. But I think their usefulness is waning. For one thing, our collective attention span has been highjacked by this kind of passive flacid listening over the active work of reading, not unlike the way we can't read maps anymore because the muscles in our brain have atrophied with the advent of GPS. When it's conversations for the sake of conversations with the circuit of internet personalities cycling through to feed the algorithm to pay the mortgage--well, maybe it's just my opinion but I think we're all getting--tired. Tired of the talking. Tired of the "dialogue." Tired of Professional Amateurs (TM).  Tired of the scrolling. Tired of the static. Tired of being fed.

I do miss the purer days of mySpace and early 2000 Facebook, though it had its day and that day has passed. I wouldn't be surprised if the quasi-novel podcast phenomenon sunsetted in the same way...with people just getting tired of it, when we look back and think, "man, I wasted a lot of time listening to people....talk with each other." 

Until, of course, something else comes in to hijack its place.