Why podcasts are so addictive (& which ones you must listen to)

This morning, from about 7.30 to 8.30, I spent an hour learning about the difference between dark matter and dark energy and why both are important.

From about 9.30, on the way to work, I learnt about the history of shoes. Then, around lunchtime, caught in a traffic jam, I learnt about Piltdown Man - the greatest paleoanthropological fraud to date.

Finally, on a quick visit to the shops, I listened to a short story by the great Raymond Carver.

Tomorrow I will start the day with an intimate eavesdrop on the sad life of a crack-addicted single mother.

My life is divided into two ages - pre-podcast and post-podcast.

The first was a dark, silent, intellectually starved cave of threadbare opinions and general bewilderment.

And now, well, I am an autodidact gaily romping through the fields of enlightenment, bursting with facts and figures and insights and new knowledge and freshly unearthed emotions. (This, I have noticed, can be very annoying to other people.)

I can tell you about the first surgery under anaesthetic, and who did it and how. And I can tell you that Leonard Cohen spent 15 years writing and rewriting Hallelujah before it became a hit. OK, I'll stop now.

FOR FREE, NO ADS

Podcasts started in earnest in 2001, brought to the world by Los Angeles programmer Dave Winer and media personality Adam Curry (although there are many other claimants).

But it was an oddity, attended to by geeks and a couple of visionaries and tinkerers and early adopters, until the confluence of iPhones and cars with Bluetooth, sometime in the late 2000s.

Suddenly you could climb into your car and listen to a radio broadcast on a topic of your choice, for free, no ads, no programme schedule.

This may strike the reader as a small matter, a peripheral technological innovation in the tsunami of new stuff that has arrived to distract and amuse us.

No, my dear friends, this not the case.

The era of podcasts is here, and at least in my case, it is life-altering. So much so that my new novel, Free Association, chose as its hero a podcaster in LA, and bounces the narrative off his periodic podcasts.

Even though I was already a podcast fanatic, I did a little research for the novel. Consider this:

• In the US, 64 million people listen to at least one podcast a month.
• Forty-two million Americans listen every week.
• Worldwide, 230 million people have downloaded Sarah Koenig's hit podcast Serial in the past 18 months (this beats the biggest music and film hits).
• Podcast downloads have grown by double digits every year for 15 years (the envy of other media).
• Listeners used to be young, but are now distributed across the age spectrum.
• Nine million Americans listen to six shows per week. I listen to more than 20.

SPRINGBOK RADIO

Podcasts have become one of the biggest media success stories in the US this century and their acceleration has now started in Europe and other territories, including our corner of the world (with local titles such as Lesser Known Somebodies, First Person, Alibi and Sound Africa, among others).

Even celebrity columnists and writers like Marianne Thamm , Darrel Bristow-Bovey and Mandy Wiener are dipping their toes in these waters.

The spread of topics is pretty much endless. Whatever your interests, there are podcasts to suit. And, more interestingly, there are brilliant podcasts utterly outside of your areas of interest. That is where some of the gold lies.

Biology is a subject in which I previously had little knowledge or specific interest. And now? Go on, ask me about the wasp parasite (oh, that's the wasp larvae whose egg was laid in the bark of a tree, later to be consumed by its host, another species of wasp. It then lives in its host's brain, turning it into a zombie, feeding off it, and eventually bursting out of its forehead).

There are more than 300,000 podcasts. And while there are many forgettable offerings in that long tail, the best of them define a new art form.

Why? What make them so compelling?

Some readers may remember a simpler time before all this electronic stuff, perhaps even before TV, when families would huddle around Springbok Radio to listen to No Place to Hide or Squad Cars. Beautifully produced dramas that I would look forward to all day at school, discuss endlessly with my friends, dream about, have nightmares about.

That 15 minutes of inhabiting that exquisitely aural world, replete with music and sound effects and dramatic dialogue, would leave me helpless with wonder and excitement.

The podcasts I listen to now, in the worlds of both fiction and fact, have that same effect. I long for a traffic jam, the worse the better. I used to go to the gym to see to my health, but now I go to pedal and listen (I have been known to turn my car around and go home if I have forgotten my headphones).

Airplane journeys zip by on a cloud of finely dressed knowledge mainlined directly into my brain. The last car trip from Johannesburg to Cape Town turned me into a near world authority in genetic engineering.

WORKS OF ART

The best of these podcasts are works of art. Even the nonfiction offerings. Beautifully sculpted, edited, practised and spooled out with the same interplay of tension and resolution that one expects of the best theatre.

It is a vastly different experience to reading - somehow more efficient, employing different parts of the brain, I suspect. A new way to commit experience to memory, to draw neural linkages that didn't exist before, to find context and comfort in understanding. It is, more often than not, intensely pleasurable.

I have tweaked and sculpted my playlist over the past five years, and will probably continue to do so, but here is the current line-up:

• Waking Up with Sam Harris (currently top of my list- philosophy, politics, technology and science presented with a new brainy guest every week - always wise, probing and profound).
• Radiolab (narrative nonfiction podcast covering some science, some journalism, some stories at the edge of life, produced with great care and gentle humour).
• This American Life (one of the first great podcast hits, having been around for well over a decade, personal stories of the US, themes brought to life by the lives of real people).
• Skeptics Guide to the Universe, The Guardian Science podcasts, Melvyn Bragg's In Our Time science series (a pleasurable way to keep up to date with science and its impact and, more pointedly, pseudo-science and its damage).
• The Moth (personal stories of tragedy or triumph or slipping on banana peels, told by amateurs without notes on a stage in front of an audience).
• Oh, and Invisibilia (psychology) and Note to Self (mainly technology) and a16z (technology) and The New York Times Book Review Podcast, and the New Yorker Fiction Podcast and Selected Shorts (fiction) and the Foreign Policy Magazine Podcast and Reveal (investigative journalism) and TED.

LEMMINGS

You get the picture. One can wallow in this stuff endlessly and never get bored. I said to my wife recently, Here is my living will: no resuscitative medicines or hospitals. Just plug some earphones into my ears and line up a stream of great podcasts and I will happily slip away.

I suspect I may be more obsessed with podcasts than most (although I have an artist friend who listens all day while he draws. Really. All day). I have tried to analyse why they have become so central in my life. Here is my best explanation. As I get older, almost everything I do is directed towards trying to fend off bewilderment, to extract context from confusion, to find out the reason.

Why? Why do politicians lie? Why is the universe on its way to a cold and lonely and endless grave? Why are sneakers so expensive? Do I know what I don't know? Why is the world the way it is? Who am I in it? Podcasts. The answers are all in there, somewhere - accessible, fun and free.

Oh, and did you know that lemmings do not follow each other to mass suicide when the population rises, as was shown in a famous documentary? It was all a cinematic hoax.

I heard it on a podcast.

PODCASTS MEDIA PERSONALITIES RECOMMEND

ZANELE KUMALO

For a no-holds-barred breakdown of black pop culture that week, The Read.

To find out what is piquing the interest of other feminists, Call Your Girlfriend.

To find solace, advice and comfort in other people's relationship lessons, Modern Love.

To revisit or discover things I should have in my memory, Stuff You Should Know.

To get a historical perspective on US politics because how did Trump become president but there's no time for schadenfreude when we have Zuma, Common Sense with Dan Carlin.

To attempt to improve my EQ, Invisibilia.

And to be entertained, documentary style, in the most slick and in-depth way, Serial.

I'm still looking for local podcasts I can enjoy without cringing. I hope Politiki and The Matt Brown Show will get there.

GARETH CLIFF

Audio is the most useful means ofabsorbing info, while doing other things. Humans have only been reading, in a broad, general sense, for a few hundred years, but we have had oral and verbal traditions for many thousands of years. It is evolutionarily the best way for us to inform and entertain ourselves.

I listen to several podcasts, including some of our flagship shows on CliffCentral.com.

Among them are Bill Maher's Real Time, Dan Carlin's Hardcore History, Malcolm Gladwell's Revisionist History, No Such Thing as a Fish and many others. I can't pick any one show on Cliffcentral.com, but we're Africa's biggest podcaster and there's plenty to choose from. I never listen to live radio anymore.

DARREL BRISTOW-BOVEY

I pester all my friends to listen to The Moment with Brian Koppelman. He's a Hollywood writer and producer - he wrote Rounders and created Billions - and each week he sits down for a long conversation with a different creative artist to discuss the creative process and specifically the hinge moment that seems to exist in just about every creative person's life that either derails them or allows them to flourish. He speaks to musicians and writers, screenwriters and directors, and has introduced me to performing artists who greatly enrich my life.

Invisibilia from NPR explores the invisible forces that shape us - assumptions, beliefs, emotions and instincts. Some episodes have genuinely made me sit up and gasp: 'Yes! That explains it!'

YOLISA MKELE

Bodega Boys, sponsored by Red Bull, K2 (synthetic marijuana) and Islamic State. This pop-culture-themed joke-a-thon is a paragon of inappropriateness. If you are not up to date on hip-hop culture this may not be for you.

Hardcore History. If you are a fan of military history, then former journalist and self-confessed history geek Dan Carlin's podcast is a must.

Waking Up with Sam Harris. Something for the more intellectually inclined. In this podcast US neuroscientist and philosopher Sam Harris interviews guests on topics that range from the moral complexity of genetics to Donald Trump and the perils of organised religion. Interesting to listen to even if you vehemently disagree with him.