In 2017, podcasts were still niche. A podcast, Michelle Dean wrote in March of that year, ‘needs to be an accretion of minutiae that satisfies the listener in his or her own obsession. The host and listener are like children counting marbles, things that have little or no value to others but that seem priceless to those engaged in the counting’. She continues: ‘Podcasts have devised new and entertaining ways to keep us informed. But they can’t quite fill the role of public broadcasting, on their own… The big picture has, so far at least, eluded them.’

In recent years, the podcast’s empire has expanded far beyond the confines of ‘public broadcasting’. Its dominions are legion and embrace ever more expansive territories: politics, history, football, entertainment, empire. Next on the list: the written word itself. In 2024, UK non-fiction sales suffered a dramatic decline, with revenue down by almost eight per cent. One worried non-fiction author I spoke to attributes the collapse in sales to a simple shift in consumer tastes: the public’s appetite for intellectual stimulation is now being met by podcasts. 

The most popular podcasts are increasingly slick. They are generally geared around a well-honed dynamic between two hosts (almost always men). Even if they are tackling important subject matter in an intelligent way, the format inevitably tends to produce – and to reproduce more and more regularly – a clubby, insider-y dynamic. Gradually, the listener’s tastes gravitate towards the in-jokes, the banter, and the gentle cut and thrust. It is not only another background sound among so many other background sounds – a kind of muzak of the intellect – but also a real and potent source of community and belonging. Attendees of the live performances are not there to hear some diamond wisdom that they might not find elsewhere – they want to have contact with something living and real, the feeling of being within a circle rather than without. And how beautiful must it feel when the implied community includes tailored access to a prestigious body of knowledge, such as history or politics.

Contrast this with the feel and ethic of Radio 4’s discussion show, In Our Time, hosted by veteran broadcaster Melvyn Bragg. Popular podcasters release multiple episodes each week; some release episodes virtually every day to chime with the latest developments in current affairs. In Our Time goes out once a week – you could lose yourself in its archive, but it would require an enormous intellectual effort, partly because it’s just too difficult to listen to. Indeed, one of the great qualities of the programme is how occasionally dull it is, perhaps because often the media experience of most of the academics who appear on it seems to be limited to appearing on other episodes of In Our Time. I love listening to the ‘unfiltered’ section they attach to the end when the academics and Bragg discuss what they wish they had included in the discussion proper. Though 90 per cent of the time I feel grateful that they didn’t manage to fit it in. The programme leaves the listener wanting more – and wanting what the academics have: one’s own lifetime’s obsession, one’s own precious field of insight and deep cognition. Only then can you win the power to exasperate someone as intuitively intelligent as Bragg. Wouldn’t that be magnificent?

In the popular podcast form, the hosts are doing the reading, so you don’t have to. In Our Time sets itself up as a way back into the world of text. A reading list is attached to the bottom of every episode. When the listening stops, that suggests, the work should start – and that’s where reading comes in. There is a psychological explanation here that suggests that reading gets to bits of the brain that listening does not stimulate. When human beings are completely alone, in silence, the brain switches on the Default Mode Network (DMN). DMN is a concept in neuropsychology, formulated in the noughties, to describe the regions of the brain that go into action when external stimuli are reduced to close to zero. It’s a term that captures a somewhat ineffable quality of mind – a flow state, a deep sense of relaxation and alertness. The DMN has ‘hubs’ spread throughout the brain, according to the psychologist Catherine Loveday, and they play an important role in ‘updating the self’, a phrase which captures a somewhat ineffable quality of mind.

Remember the last time you were reading in silence? You didn’t devote your full attention span to the printed page. Occasionally, your mind’s eye drifts off to the day’s events, perhaps tracing over some memory mysteriously excavated by the passage you’re reading. Then the mind’s attention folds back into the page – consciousness hooked back into the patterns of the text. Sometimes those patterns draw you on for hours at a time. Then something disturbs you in the background and you get up to make a cup of tea and look out of the window. For some reason, your perspective feels a lot less narrow, the mind a lot richer.

The insight that certain ways of reading can stimulate different forms of attention is nothing new – it is a problem that obsesses Miguel Cervantes throughout Don Quixote. His hero’s reading habits reflect the popular romances that were very much in vogue in the society of late Imperial Spain – full of kitsch medievalism, damsels in distress and knights in shining armour. But the novel is full of long diversionary passages, in which the more level-headed characters debate what makes a good fiction. They react with alarm at Don Quixote’s madness, inspired as it is by the vivid and magical books he has read, and worry that an increasingly literate society is not necessarily a more educated one. Layered into a vast text which has room for dozens of narrators and many more stories and characters, Cervantes suggests that reading habits should be as varied as the best texts. Why, Cervantes asks, should readers prefer books like his – knotty, long, endlessly diversionary – to the cheap ‘penny dreadfuls’ of his day? Cervantes bets that posterity will want what he has to offer. He’s so sure of it that, in volume two of his epic, characters praise the first volume over copycat versions, some of which really did circulate in real-life, because it is the true ‘history’ of Don Quixote and because of its special literary qualities, the sensitivity of characterisation, its moral value. It is a source of entertainment, yes, but also something more.

The most popular podcasts are increasingly driven by plot – and they are all-consuming in the way novels driven solely by plot can be. A thriller, such as Lionel Davidson’s masterful Kolymsky Heights, is hard to put down because one thing happens after another, bang, bang, bang, vivid, dextrous, magnetic. When I read PG Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Wooster stories, I almost always end up reading the entire book in one go – each elegantly constructed scene follows on from the last with a quite extraordinary level of narrative discipline. They are immensely pleasurable to read – and the comic moments are as ridiculously well engineered as the overall effort. But I would not always want to read novels by PG Wodehouse or all-plot thrillers, however readable they are. By contrast, some novelists aim to stake out virtually every conceivable emotional state: in Anna Karenina, Tolstoy even imagines what it might be like to see the world from the inside of a dog’s brain. The muddy metaphysics of the greatest novels says that no experience is too mundane or banal to get the literary treatment.

Podcasts use this deeply rooted appetite for story and story-making and direct it to increasingly large swathes of human endeavour. The risks are very serious – a public that is only ‘here for the plot’ when its interest settles on politics or history will find itself confused when the story doesn’t go its way.