Recently, visiting the rural village where I grew up on the Baltic Sea coast of Sweden, I was intrigued by how the pattern of my high school friends' conversations had changed. Over the decade and a half I had been gone, their speech had taken on an unmistakable tone, one that I do not associate with the pine forests and beach meadows and old lumber mills: that of American intellectual interview podcasts.
The shift isn’t all that surprising, given that they have likely spent more time listening to Lex Fridman and others talk than they have spent listening to their colleagues talk at work, especially because Scandinavia has the highest rate of podcast penetration in the world. Though podcasts are not an ideal medium for conveying information, they are ideal for the transmission of patterns of speech and thought. We’re not particularly good at learning facts by listening, but we are good at modeling the tone, cadence, and form of speech we listen to, especially if it is as unstructured and informal as a conversation.
When listening to a recording of someone talking, you react much as you do when talking to someone in person. It is a parasocial interaction, a psychological illusion in which you behave as if you are in a social situation, even though the other party is just a voice in your headphones. You shift your behavior to match the recording and begin to unconsciously mimic the talkers’ speech patterns. The more informal the tone, the stronger this illusion of interacting with the other person, and the more we converge toward their tone. The convergence toward the values and speech patterns of the person we are talking to (or have the psychological illusion of talking to) also increases if we perceive them as higher in status than we are. All of this points to intellectual interview podcasts—such The Ezra Klein Show, Conversations with Tyler, or The Tim Ferriss Show— being a new and powerful means of spreading speech patterns.
With repeated exposure, the mimicry that your social instincts induce can permanently reshape the way you speak. We see this in the vanishing of strong regional dialects as media spread and people have more interactions with people with other dialects, and in the numerous grammatical constructions that have spread by being used on television.
This speech mimicry is easy to hear where I grew up, since the new phrases and grammatical constructions come from a different language. At a rural Swedish pizzeria, my friends asked me to steelman the case against a point I was making, saying the word in English. Or they would mess up the word order in a Swedish sentence by doing a direct translation of a speech pattern they’ve picked up from a podcast (“Let me reflect back what you said”).
And since we internalize these patterns and use them as a latticework for our thought—how does our thinking change in this new media climate?
In 1962, the German sociologist Jürgen Habermas published one of the foundational works in media studies, a book called The Structural Transformations of the Public Sphere. Habermas argued that what he calls the public sphere—a space separate from both private life and the state, where people engage in intellectual discussions about the society they live in—did not exist in the Middle Ages. There were only private conversations and official government proclamations.
How did the public sphere come into being? It evolved out of the private letter conversations that intellectuals had with each other. By the Renaissance, the price of long-distance communication had dropped to a level that allowed previously isolated scholars to connect. Leveraging this, a small group of European intellectuals, retrospectively known as the Republic of Letters, established a letter-writing network spanning Europe. In these letters, they collectively invented a new way of thinking and being, a new culture.
One of the key persons in the establishment of this network was the Dutch scholar Erasmus. Erasmus spent a large part of his life riding on horseback across Europe, visiting all the fascinating people he could find, and introducing them to each other. He rode and he wrote, and he rode so much that he had to learn how to write on a horse—at least he claims so in the prologue to his most famous piece of writing, In Praise of Folly, a letter he wrote to his friend Thomas More, the English essayist and statesman who died without a head. In the letter, human folly holds court and praises itself in a 200-page monolog written, Erasmus says, as his horse carried him across the Alps.
Erasmus wrote an indecent amount of letters. Living as the printing press began spreading, Erasmus also pioneered the practice of reprinting letters so they could be distributed far and wide. The best letters would be read aloud at parties. For hundreds of years thereafter, people would read these letters and emulate the tone. Erasmus’ Latin was intimately personal, less formal than Medieval Latin, yet rich in references to antiquity and serious concern around theology, philosophy, and governance. The informal style made it easy for people to relate to Erasmus and his interlocutors as if they were friends, and pick up their worldview and style through social learning.
In other words, the reading public formed parasocial relationships with the intellectuals. They internalized the conversational norms of the letters the intellectuals addressed to each other. Through mimicry, the readers started converging on a new set of values, new patterns of language, and a new way of viewing the world. And, returning to Habermas, so the public sphere was born— from scaling the private communication between intellectuals to increasingly large circles, first by reprinting letters, later through journals, literary salons, and public lectures.
But then it disintegrated. By the time Habermas was writing The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, the public had largely disappeared. Habermas blamed this on the shift toward a mass media approach among publishers and the spread of radio and TV. As publishing and media consolidated and became economic juggernauts, the content they produced, the input that shaped the thought patterns of the population, became increasingly packaged and artificial. It no longer gave a window into the types of conversation and thought that drove intellectual progress. It wasn’t informal and authentic enough to let us learn how intellectuals grapple with a question.
The attraction of interview podcasts is their DIY nature. It is a return to the intellectual imitation that marked the birth of the public. But it is of an entirely different scale and reach. The group that listens to hours-long intellectual conversations every week these days numbers in the millions. And many of them live, like my high school friends, in places where it would have been impossible to overhear an intellectual conversation only 15 years ago.
Anecdotally, people are picking up new behaviors and mental models from the conversations they overhear. They are imitating, at least on a superficial level, the strategies intellectuals use when confronting hard questions in real time (“You are saying …”, “Let me rephrase that question,” “There are several sub-questions here; let me start with …”). They absorb the tone that successful people use to establish casual rapport with someone they have just met. Podcast listeners also hear, again and again, how someone good at asking questions provides a context for someone else to be interesting.
We might also be picking up dysfunctional patterns. Putting these thoughts to my friends in the village, they played the devil’s advocate (saying the phrase in English). One of them observed that he felt like they were getting worse at turn-taking when talking—which could be a pattern picked up by listening to people who monolog while the podcast host does all the conversational labor.
As we consider the impact of the podcast phenomenon on a global scale, it is intriguing to ponder where the trend might lead us. The French Revolution, the founding of the United States, industrialization, the growth of science—these trends and events can be parsed as the Republic of Letters attempting to remake the world in its image: cosmopolitan, skeptical of received authority, and rational.
The values, ideas, and norms that spread through DIY broadcasting and parasocial imitation today—can that shape the world, too? It is tempting to be dismissive of such ideas. For every person listening to an eight-hour intellectual podcast, there are 10 who listen to gossip and entertainment.
But this was true of the early modern age too. When Erasmus sat on horseback sketching letters, it didn’t look like much. He was just talking to his friends, and what difference can a few antiquity nerds make? The world around them was descending into witch hunts and religious wars. The budding public, who listened in on the intellectual conversations, was a rounding error in the population statistics. Yet we now live in the world they wrote into being.
We shouldn't underestimate the power of social learning, and what can happen when the social environment that intellectually curious people can access improves. Podcasts are an experiment in expanding access to specific types of intellectual conversations of a scale that has never been attempted before. People in rural Sweden listen in, as do millions in India, Nigeria, Brazil, and other areas that until recently had no access to the conversations and thought patterns at American research institutions or Silicon Valley startups. As they start identifying with these ways of being through parasocial relationships—as they start talking like this, as they start companies and blogs and engage in conversations about nuclear fusion or AI alignment or Georgist economics—what will happen then?