I won’t claim to be an expert or anything, but I think I have a more than slight authority on podcasts. I subscribe to anywhere between 20 and 50 podcasts depending on how busy I am. They’ve been part of my daily routine for the past five years, at least.

You Look Nice Today was my first podcast, I think, and it both set the bar high and framed my expectations for the form. It was strange, funny, self-referential. There are various un-PC moments (‘any time Merlin talks about the immigrant population of San Francisco’, springs to mind) but it’s coming from a decent place. Or, at least, it comes from a place that tries so hard to please you and make you laugh that the misfires are few and forgivable.

Obviously there are podcasters like Marc Maron, who have been around forever. He was a semi-successful/semi-burnt out comedian before WTF. Based on the popularity of his podcast, he’s recorded and released new material in various forms, none of which have been very interesting to me. To me, Maron is a classic interview guy (duh), and how much you like him comes down to how well you regard his interviewing skills and the greatness of his guests. Both have risen with alacrity over the last few years, but I find he brings too much “authority” to the table with too little “expertise” on anything. Like, his thoughts on music are like most people’s thoughts on music: totally ossified at what he thought was cool in his early twenties. For twenty-year-olds, that makes the music of the world your playground. For fifty-year-olds, it must be either terrifying or a non-factor, subjectively, depending on how much self-awareness you have. Either way, it makes for shit listening IMO.

This week’s episode of the excellent podcast Another Round with Heben & Tracy spurred this post. It was about the “whiteness of the 'public radio voice’”, code switching, and the relative insularity of the podcasting world. I remember reading the original post by Chenjerai Kumanyika, “Challenging The Whiteness Of Public Radio”, that spurred the episode itself. Kumanyika and Demby’s lens is of course blackness and public radio, which isn’t my lens. But that little graph above relates to their concerns, I think, and is something I’ve been thinking about a lot, recently.

Two years ago, I wrote an essay about how listening to podcasts was probably bad for me. A few weeks ago, I found myself writing another version of that essay, which would have been pretty boring and redundant. My thinking on that part of the podcast-listening experience has not changed much: there’s a difference between stimulation and activity or constant arousal and frequent learning. Listening all day to podcasts is/was, for me, an expedient way to make a walk with the dogs 'not boring’, but an awful way for me to think about things and reflect on life. Outside the moment, I decided again that 'being not bored’ is less important to me than thinking about things and reflecting on life, so I’m going to try to reduce my podcast listening. This was another catalyst for writing this essay, but not exactly related to it.

The synthesis of these two impetuses is what I call white male nerd voice, my very least favorite thing to have piped into my ears. For me, white male nerd voice occurs for the most part whenever a podcast host veers too far above the blue line running over the Authority-Expertise graph above. At first I didn’t notice white male nerd voice, and most every podcast probably qualified as a white male nerd enterprise, anyway, but times have changed and so have I.

There’s a popular term, “mansplaining”, with which white male nerd voice shares many family resemblances. It’s almost always a man, almost always a white man, though not exclusively, who will attempt to explain or describe in intimate detail a fact or phenomenon that he is not well-qualified to explain or describe. With regard to him and you, the listener. Thus, it’s a relational quality and not an intrinsic one. The canonical example of the male party guest explaining the point of a female author’s own book to herself. This male party guest could explain the point of the female author’s book to someone else without mansplaining. To a woman or a man. It comes down to the listener’s relative level of knowledge or expertise on the issue. An all female class of total dilettantes on the subject? A perfect occasion, if they are all willing, which I would suspect they are not but that’s not the issue rn.

So this particular graph will probably be different for different people. I say probably even though it’s definitely because I feel there are some relatively “objective” points. I do think Adnan is guilty based off of Natasha Vargas-Cooper’s interviews with Jay Wilds and Kevin Urick at The Intercept. You can google it if you’re interested. I know those interviews are controversial and my opinion is not necessarily the mainstream one, but it seems clear to me after listening to Serial and reading those interviews. What can I say.

Right, but knowing my amateur opinion on the matter doesn’t clear things up, I get it. Why is Sarah Koenig above the Blue Line Of Authority-Expertise? Because she presented on her podcast with an amount of Authority (confidence, blitheness, seeming facticity) intersecting with a level of Expertise (inherent, learned, experiential, organizational) that I found distasteful. Totally subjective, but a powerful tool, I think, to put a reason to why some podcasts rub you the wrong way (or just suck).

Obviously, being in the upper-left quadrant is bad. Jordan Morris on racial humor: he makes racist jokes all the time and they’re never funny. The situation demonstrates a lot of Authority on Jordan’s part (shown by confidence and repetition) with an alarming insufficiency of Expertise on the matter. He’s no Dave Chappelle, right. I’ve mentioned Marc Maron – he doesn’t really claim to be an expert on anything, but he has an opinion on everything, and I personally think he’s wrong almost all the time. John Gruber, a person with a lot of Authority on Apple and a decent amount of Expertise. His Expertise is far outweighed by his Authority, though. He’s wrong more than he’s right, bases his analysis on hunches and groupthink, and is still insanely influential in the press surrounding the world’s most valuable corporation. I actually find the whole situation terrifying and awful, but I can only settle for not listening or subscribing to his podcast.

You will note that the Blue Line Of Authority-Expertise is not a straight diagonal X=Y type of graph. That’s because I believe the cost of Authority is greater than the value of Expertise. You can know a lot about something while still coming off like a jackass. (Perhaps me, with this whole long post and chart about podcasts?) The way I’ve drawn the line also allows for people who do not present as great Authorities still failing the Authority-Expertise 'test’. (The aforementioned Sarah Koenig, who it should be said, claimed to have gone at the case with an open mind; I think she did not and the whole production was in bad faith, but w/e.)

There is one person, Dacia Clay, who is way in the lower-left quadrant representing total ignorance and pure layperson’s prerogative in re: classical music. That’s because her podcast, Classical Classroom, is about her learning the ins and outs of classical music as a total beginner. This type of podcast is usually edifying and entertaining if the host is charismatic or has 'it’, but that’s not always the case. David Huntsberger (et al.) of Professor Blastoff is just too… inexpert about too many of the topics to create an entertaining show. The premise, three comedians learn about the headiest of topics like astrobiology, seems good on paper, but it doesn’t work (again, imo).

The same person can occupy multiple points on the chart, especially if they create a lot of podcast content like Bill Simmons. He is, despite being a dirty rotten homer, a foremost expert on the NBA. Almost all of his thoughts and opinions on pop culture, however, are awful, unfounded, or just wrong. In such cases, you really have to pick your spots or decide whether the whole thing is worth the inevitable frustrations you’ll face in being a listener.

Finally and related to this above point, you’ll notice each entry has an area of expertise. “Demi Adejuyigbe on the early 2000s” definitely detracts from the otherwise excellent Gilmore Guys podcast. But since the podcast is not about-about the early 2000s, it’s not a deal-breaker. (It is relatively important, though, to consider since Gilmore Girls is basically a metonym for the early 2000s.)

So, there’s a lot to take in here, maybe. It’s just the first draft, 8am thoughts on the subject. (Double terrifying: I’ve been writing this essay for over an hour, then, and “first draft” implies some future efforts at refinement.) It’s also a very personal (again, personal and subjective) account of my own podcast listening experience. There are a ton more people I could add, I’m sure, if I spent more time on it. Also, there’s not really enough room to write in people in the upper-right quadrant of high Authority, high Expertise. Most (good) podcasts, I find, house their hosts there. Not a coincidence!

To return briefly to what I now realize was one of my main points, White Male Nerd Voice needs not be white, male, or nerdy, but those are the most common taxonomies under which you find the phenomenon. It just is a stance toward knowledge that takes the form of grasping-for and failing-to-reach. A lot of podcasts I dislike, like Stuff You Should Know, take this approach. 'Oh look at us, we’re experts. Just kidding, we’re not experts. Except we are, so shut up!’ Granted, those guys are genuinely nice-seeming guys, but on anyone even half a percent less overtly nice-seeming, the rhetorical-stylistic-epistemological operation makes them seem like the worst person ever. Devin Faraci, on the first and only episode of The Canon I listened to, frequently and vehemently screamed at the (female, not that it probably matters) LA Times film critic that he will “teach her what film is” and all manner of variations on that phrase: that is the primary example in my mind when I say White Male Nerd Voice. It’s not a good look!

I hope you’ve enjoyed this overly long, probably unrelatable, enterprise. It was much like my own personal podcast about podcasts, but in written-visual form.