Podcasts have become a hugely popular and influential part of the media ecosystem. Their length and open-endedness offer the potential for conversations that reach deeper. For the broadcaster Kirsty Young, podcasts are “changing our ears” in altering our relationship with audio. They have revealed a “thirst” for length and depth and “connection”, just at the time when much media has become ultra-short and “Tik Tok-able”.

A cultural shift

Podcasts have also, Young believes, exploited a “a cultural shift”, with people generally happier to talk about their lives in an ‘unguarded’ way, more willing to talk about darker aspects of their lives. Young’s Young Again series illustrates this well, with her emphasis on “light, not heat”, aiming to “illuminate” her guests, not “turn them over”. Her clear fascination with her guests is clear and this seems to give her the “permission” to get into deeper areas. Her recent Irvine Welsh episode focussed on his experiential view of life: “I’ve always seen myself as a learning machine.”

What often emerges from such long form interviews is people “going a bit further than they intend to go”. Talking to a stranger can be freeing in some sense. I had this experience recently when interviewed by Angela Casey from Edinburgh Outdoors, a podcast that focuses on “exploring green spaces and the people in them to be found in and around Edinburgh”. The conversation focussed on my interest in quiet routes around Edinburgh, especially the ex-railway path network.

Successful conversation-led podcasts connect to the idea of deep conversation as articulated by the historian and polymath Theodore Zeldin. Born in 1933, Zeldin has been a visionary historian, engaged in a conversation with the past, from which new insights may emerge. Conversations are, for Zeldin, at the heart of what it means to be human and creative and a route out of the inconveniences of loneliness and isolation.

Zeldin believes that our contemporary world is full of communication but lacks meaningful conversation. Central to his philosophy is the idea that conversation can stimulate profound personal and social change. His particular interest is in transformative conversations – the type from which we are prepared to emerge a slightly different person. A powerful idea.

Zeldin questions the “virtues of introspection”, arguing that this can be a bit of a cul-de-sac. We should not be retreating from others but engaging with them. This is the route to a fuller life. Ultimately, other people “are infinitely more interesting” and “have infinitely more to say”.

Creating new cards

Many aspects of modern society are shifting us away from conversations with those outside of our immediate networks. We are, it is widely argued, witnessing an era of disconnection and an erosion of civic spaces, with online communication dominated by non-geographic communities, sharing narrow interests. For Zeldin, social networks “have mainly specialised in brief and superficial exchanges”. Instead, it is the meeting of minds with different backgrounds and interests that stimulates genuine exchange. As Zeldin powerfully puts it: “when minds meet they don’t just exchange facts: they transform them, reshape them, engage in new trains of thought. Conversation doesn’t just reshuffle the cards: it creates new cards.”

Zeldin uses the metaphor of “procreation” to suggest that only in genuine engagement with others can you be truly “intellectually fertile”. He argues that true creativity is not an individual act; “we can’t just sit and think out of our own heads”. Instead, we all need some form of muse to inspire new thinking and help us “produce something whose exact dimensions and character I can’t predict”. Embedded in Zeldin’s promotion of the deep conversation is this open-ended aspect. As he asks rhetorically, “is a successful conversation one which goes exactly as planned”.

Emotional connection

The conversation I had for Edinburgh Outdoors was, like the paths themselves, full of interesting connections and tangents. What emerged was that it’s not the detailed history of the railways that interests me, rather my emotional connection to them. During tough times, lengthy wanders along them have, if you pardon the pun, got me back on track. I was happy to go into that more revealing territory because the questioning was gentle, not interrogatory.

What also emerged was an evangelical aspect to my promotion of path exploration. In the past few years, I’ve discovered several superb paths and spots in Edinburgh that I wasn’t previously aware of. This has given me the hunger to seek out more, the next ‘hit’.

Recent finds include Gorgie Green Lane which provides a slice of an Edinburgh unacknowledged in guidebooks or by influencers. Also, the superb Burdiehouse Burn Path which takes you through a gentle valley, deeply wooded at parts.

These emotional and evangelical aspects would not have emerged if the conversation had been short, or if the questions were asked in a robotic way. In a podcast, the conversation has time to breathe. We should be striving to find the time for more such deep conversations in our daily lives. ■

Charlie Ellis

Info: The author thanks Isabel Crozier and Howard Beck for their encouragement on this piece