Pandemic Podcasting

The running joke since March 2020 is that “anyone can start a podcast.” I’m here to tell you that is absolutely false.

Actually, if I’m being fair, it’s only partially false. I mean, anyone capable of sitting in front of a microphone and speaking aloud, who also posses even the most rudimentary understanding of how to mouse-click their way through the dozens of online, pre-fab “podcast set-up” sites can, technically, “start” a podcast. Will they be able to sustain it, much less grow it? No. Will it be good? Almost certainly not. Will it cost them waaay more money than it was worth? Absolutely. I learned these lessons the hard way. In late 2020, I started my first podcast (Black Mirror Reflections) and, like millions of locked-down others, thought podcasting was just about pointing a microphone in the right direction and saying something interesting. 

It’s not that easy.

When I listen back to my earliest BMR podcast episodes from four years ago, it’s almost painful to hear the amateur production value of them, how raw and janky the whole show was, how many easily-correctible mistakes I made. I suppose, in retrospect, I’m glad those mistakes were made in 2020, when the podcast market was being flooded by utterly vacuous content with even worse production value, but I wish every day that I could go back and re-record many of those Black Mirror Reflections conversations. I had SUCH amazing content– really deep and insightful conversations with some of the nation’s leading intellectuals: Charles McKinney, Eric Steinhart, Roman Yampolskiy, Charles W. Mills, Zandria Robinson, Samir Chopra, Karen Tongson, Thi Nguyen, John Danaher, and more!– but what I did not have at the time was the editorial discipline or technical skills to take high-quality raw material, butcher it properly in the editing bay, and then plate like a Michelin chef.

So, I spent a hours and hours on YouTube and Reddit, I picked up some rudimentary skills, I asked a lot of stupid questions, I made a lot of stupid mistakes. I learned from them, I kept at it, I connected with literally anyone who would talk to me about how to get better. Eventually, I came out on the other end having spent a lot of time and energy working hard to develop my craft, and and now I am very, very good at it.

I went on to create, produce, edit and co-host another podcast, Hotel Bar Sessions, which launched in early 2021 and is now in its tenth season. (We do 15 episodes per season, and release new episodes once a week on Fridays.)The basic idea behind HBS was that we wanted to recreate the kinds of conversations that academic philosophers have at the end of a long conference day when they meet up at the hotel bar: smart, probing, and engaging, but more laid-back than a published paper or lecture. Like all collaborative projects, it had a bumpy start, but now it runs like a well-oiled machine. HBS has been through a few “talent” changes over the years, but Rick Lee (DePaul University) has been my most consistent co-host. He started in Season 2 and has stayed with it since, I know he will co-sign when I say that podcasting is a lot of work– though less now than it was in our earlier seasons with Charles Peterson (Oberlin College) and then, later Jason Read (University of Southern Maine), as co-hosts. 

I often wonder if I would’ve gotten into podcasting if COVID didn’t happen. I think I would have, because I get the itch to take up a new project every few years, but I definitely would not have had the time or energy to take it as seriously as I have– nor grow it at quickly as it has grown– without the lockdown and everything that came with it.

That said, I genuinely do believe that podcasting is the best thing to happen to academic Philosophy since blogging. The Philosophy blogosphere was an amazing place for about a decade between roughly 2005-2015ish, with active, engaged, intelligent, productive and mostly collegial discussions. Then, like most things on the internet, blogs slowly got swallowed up by social media platforms and the attention-capture economy of that industry. Bit by bit, the conversations that used to happen in the comment sections of a particular blog moved to the comment sections of Facebook post/links, then to Twitter and… well, we all know what is lost when one tries to have careful, nuanced, respectful conversations on social media platforms. Le sigh.

Philosophy podcasts aren’t a perfect replacement for what we lost in those halcyon days of the Philosophy blogosphere, of course. Podcasting has its own challenges, not the least of which is that it will never be as personally “interactive” as the best blogs were. People plug in their earbuds and listen to podcasts, often while they’re fully immersed in the minutiae of every day life: driving, cooking, working out, grocery shopping, whatever. They may never know (or want to know) the people behind the voices they hear. The model is, at its base, “theatrical”: there are performers and there is an audience, and whatever interaction they have, if any at all, is post hoc. It isn’t a live conversation happening in real time– I mean, nothing is a live conversation except a live conversation— but, unlike blogs, podcasts don’t have to be a soliloquy. 

My guess is that part of the reason we saw so many co-hosted (or “conversational”) podcasts sprout up during the pandemic was that we desperately missed the magic, the humor and, to be honest, the friendliness, and the surprises that happen in real human conversations. (Prior to COVID, a majority of podcasts were solo-hosted, whether they were narrative, educational, news-based, or comedy. The “interview-based” podcast was the exception.) In 2020, we were craving conversation.

That is at least part of the reason why I launched my two podcasts, Black MIrror Reflections and Hotel Bar Sessions. I missed conversations, too.

But what I’ve realized since is that podcasting may be one of the last, great hopes for professional academic philosophers to save themselves from oblivion. We’ve done a piss-poor job of justifying our existence, not only to the lawmakers and administrators holding the purse-strings, but also to the general public. As our discipline has become more and more rarefied and insular, as we have tightened our death-grasp on outdated platforms of communication and dying models of information distribution, as we have become more elitist nepotistic, ignoring the critical importance of good teachers to our survival as a profession, we have actually become the caricatures of our out-of-touch, navel-gazing, egomaniacal selves.

As philosophers, we should know that philosophy is best done in conversation, but for too long we’ve only been talking to ourselves. And we’re the worse for it. 

If you’re reading this, please give Hotel Bar Sessions a listen. If you like it, subscibe. If you don’t, here are some other excellent philosophy podcasts to check out:

(If you like any of the above, be sure to subscribe to their podcasts and support them, too!)