Your Podcast Identity

Growing up in Mission, Texas in the 1960s and 70s, I realized the magazines you read reveal a lot about who you are. My family had a typical Middle America subscription profile. Reader’s Digest, Life, Look, Sports Illustrated, Ladies Home Journal. National Geographic. My rowdier friends read Dave Campbell’s Texas Football and the NRA’s American Rifleman.

Due to technology and fractured demographics, the great Middle Class magazine rack doesn’t really exist now. Some, like Look, are long gone, others like the soft-sold Sports Illustrated are barely hanging on. I was surprised to learn that the Saturday Evening Post still appears, drawing on its incredible archive of stories and illustrations. 

With everybody reading on their phones these days, who’s left to read printed magazines? Well, there’s me; I still prefer print to electronic literature and enjoy hard copies of magazines with a more narrow appeal, like Reason, for libertarians, City Journal, The Jewish Review of Books and the Princeton Alumni Weekly.

But my magazine approach to personal definition is shifting to a new medium, podcasts. Podcasts may be crashingly familiar to most people who don’t live off-the-grid, but they’re new to me. Being a chronic late adopter, I viewed podcasts as unknown territory. I work at home, so I have already have enough online programming to distract me without podcasts adding another layer to keep me from productive labor. 

Then, after I replaced my battery-challenged Samsung phone with an iPhone 7, I realized podcast’s value as portable programming. I began doing hour-long walks around the bucolic town where I live for exercise. A long walk can get boring, so I decided to . . . try a podcast. I started finding programs I liked, some of them lasting exactly the length of my walk. 

What do I enjoy? Mostly foreign music and languages. I’m a nut for lifelong learning. The Latin Alternative loops me in to trends in Latin music and Israel Hour Radio does the same for Hebrew music. Culture Shock: The African Music Podcast sounds promising.

I’ve cycled through Portuguese and Hebrew language programs, a dip into Dutch. I tried Yiddish, too. Learning Brazilian Portuguese through Brazilian music works great for me. Lately I’ve expanded with The Moth and Mortified, two story-telling programs where I’d love to perform. To my delight, I learned my son and I both subscribe to RadioLab and This American Life.

AND, podcasts totally revamped my morning habits. My routine is I get up and feed the cats, then exercise. For months I worked out while flipping from local news to CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, then on to music videos on MTV, VH-1, BET and CMT. The problem: All are swamped with mind-numbing ads. You know them: credit repair, auto insurance, MyPillow, Cash Net USA, Poshmark. DEAR GOD MAKE THEM STOP, PLEASE! They repeat so often I memorized them. “Money’s on the way with Cash Net USA!”  I spent as much time pointlessly clicking around as I did watching actual content. My fitness routine suffered from the interruptions. 

Then I had the brilliant idea: why not listen to a podcast while I feel the burn? I could hear what I wanted and skip the endless ads. I decided to try a new program. 

So I dialed up Take One, a podcast of 10-minute segments on Jewish learning, with a host and a guest mulling over a page a day of the Talmud. That’s the massive collection of legal arguments and stories written down about 1500 years ago. I  had tried learning Talmud before but nothing clicked. But Take One’s format and content speak to me. I can get in three segments by the time I’ve stretched, crunched my abs and (clap!) pumped up with hand weights.

It follows the seven-year cycle of studying the Talmud so I can listen to something new every weekday until 2027! Thanks, Take One!

I’m still tinkering with what I call my Podcast Magazine Stack. Subscriptions come and go, programs vanish after a few episodes. Programs of Talmud, Dutch and bouncy Afropop are the friendly officemates keeping me company during my solitary home-office days. I’ll keep looking for the right vibe for the right time. 

Who knows, I may be sharing some programs with you in American Podcast Nation. What’s YOUR podcast identity?