Colin Wright@SwipeWright
Podcasting lets people speak vaguely about a topic while creating the impression of thorough treatment. I’ve often pushed back on something a podcaster posted on X, only to be told by their fans that it was “thoroughly addressed” somewhere in a three-hour podcast.
But when I listen to the relevant section, it doesn’t deliver. It’s often just more vagueness and dancing around the issue, avoiding making direct, falsifiable claims they can be held to.
There’s a reason many podcasters don’t write articles about the topics they discuss. Writing forces them to make coherent arguments without fluff. It forces them to connect every link between premise and conclusion. It forces them to cite sources accurately instead of speaking vaguely off the cuff.
It’s also easier to be misled by smooth-talking podcasters. People like listening to podcasts because spoken language is the more natural way humans have received information throughout our evolutionary history. But that doesn’t mean it’s the best way to communicate with precision. It’s not.
Podcasters also form relationships with their audiences. They speak to them like friends, even like family. None of this is necessarily a bad thing, but it can lead people to lower their standards for accepting the claims they make.
A statement communicated verbally by a skilled orator can sound convincing, when the same statement written down plainly would seem absurd. This is why people who both write well and speak eloquently—think Douglass Murray and Christopher Hitchens—are so influential.
Podcasting also puts a moat around claims due to the effort required to extract the relevant information. Fewer people are willing to wade through long episodes, constantly hitting ⏩ to find the segment in question, and then transcribe the audio into text.
Podcasters can also more easily claim they were taken out of context, whether due to clipping or failing to have watched the previous week’s 3-hour episode that supposedly laid all the groundwork. It’s more difficult to claim this when your arguments are stated clearly and succinctly in writing.
Podcasts are great. But anyone presenting themselves as a public intellectual and making serious, high-stakes claims about the world needs to do more than talk. They need to write.
