#007 - Podcasts and Politics
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Podcasts
This week I was listening to the 2021 year-end highlights edition of the Off-Menu podcast by James Acaster and Ed Gamble.
It’s one of my absolute favourite shows. The format is genius, the guests are excellent, and they’re just long enough that a couple of episodes will make any otherwise boring car journey zip by.
As with any self-respecting ‘best-of’ compilation, this particuar episode revisited some of the funniest and most memorable clips of the year.
Most of the excerpts were familiar - it seems my taste in on-the-podcast-circuit comedians is nicely attuned to the zeitgesit - with only a few new suprises scattered amongst the repeated segments.
Yet what really struck me while listening was no particular highlight itself.
Instead, I was quite surprised to realise that, for each of the clips I’d heard before, there was a vivid image conjured in my mind’s eye.
In each case, that image was of the place I’d been when I’d heard the clip the first time, often much earlier in the car.
Admittedly most of these mental portraits were of a dreary stretch of motorway somewhere in the UK, but even that fact belies something interesting.
I had not previously appreciated the ability of a podcast to create this kind of powerful mental association, no matter how mundane the target.
Seemingly, I was finding that a podcast clip could etch an associated time, place, and context into my brain with remarkable clarity.
It’s similar to the effect that we often attribute to smell and taste, which can transport us to a specific memory.
I can’t say the same thing for music or other forms of audio in general.
Music tends to illict an emotion, rather than some specific mental scenery.
This got me wondering: why would a podcast clip have this effect where, say, my favourite songs of the year would not?
So far my working explanation is two-fold.
For one, podcasts are so ‘single-use’ that we don’t usually have multiple memories competing for neural bandwidth, where our favourite song gets played hundreds of times in potentially widely-varied circumstances.
Add to that the fact that a clip from a podcast is essentially a short story, whose slower pace affords it the luxury of detail and narrative. That’s not to say that music can’t also tell stories, but there’s nothing for making a point stick like a spoken tale.
Speaking of podcasts, I recently had the pleasure of appearing on The Observatory podcast, hosted by Luke Lehepuu.
We had a really fun chat about Bitcoin, web3, and the future of the internet. Fingers crossed you won’t end up associating it with a roadworks logjam…
Politics
Until (relatively) recently I cared quite a bit about politics. To be fair, it would have been quite difficult not to with the last 5 or 6 years we’ve had.
I would make a decent effort at staying abreast of all the goings-on in Westminster.
For a time, during the painstaking mess that implementing Brexit became, nights in spent watching votes of amendments in the House of Commons became a regular form of pseudo-entertainment.
But since just before the beginning of Covid-19, I’ve made a concerted effort to detach from it all.
I’ve more or less gone cold turkey, in fact.
I recognised, via the wise words of a many others, that there was very little to be gained from spectating, and the distraction it causes brings far outweighs any real benefit beyond superficially ‘feeling’ informed.
One recent event, however, did catch my attention.
The revelations of (even as I write, a rapidly growing number) of Downing Street parties during lockdown restrictions in 2020 curdled my stomach.
And not because of the particular act itself. I actually struggle to muster any genuine ire over a rule-breaking cheese-and-wine party given some of the starker abuses of authority we’ve seen in recent times.
Instead, it was the leaked footage of political advisers chortling about the events, unwittingly on-camera, that made be baulk.
“This is recorded“
Amidst the snide remarks and sniggers, Allegra Stratton suddenly notes that the mock briefing they’re rehearsing is recorded.
I’m still not sure which aspect of that moment worried me most.
Was that her remark confirmed that the political class had knowingly done wrong?
Or was it the jovial tone she delivered it with, implying that she had no realistic fear of being caught despite it being on camera?
Both of these questions are what, for me, this one line should remind us about the corridors of power we are now subject to.
That wrongdoing is not only prevalent, but commited without fear of reproach.
What to take away from all of this?
Well, in fact this just reifies my decision to keep a wide berth of politics.
There’s very little to be gained worrying about minutiae from the sidelines when the culture behind closed doors is to play by another set of rules entirely.
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