The Society Podcasts
When I describe a podcast as boring, that doesn’t mean I want to shut it off.
At the beginning of a midnight drive home to Los Angeles from San Diego, my partner selected a podcast at random and promptly fell asleep. With no one to talk to, nor anything to look at but the flickers of reflective signage on the darkened highway, I silently joined an exchange between Marc Maron, the host, and his celebrity guest, Quentin Tarantino. The two shot the shit for over an hour and a half, mining the recesses of their minds for passable content with many pauses and tangents in between. They exchanged long anecdotes amid contemplations on old-fashioned jokes, B movies, and local news.
I was not on the edge of my seat, exactly, but the mundane realism of the long-form conversation did help us get home in one piece in the early morning, just as the two were patting one another on the back for a podcast well done. (I later visited the r/MarkMaron subreddit to see what others thought. “Man this interview was so goddamn fast,” one Redittor commented. “Just like his movies, I wanted this to be 16 hours long.”)
This experience—listening to a long and meandering celebrity podcast during a long car ride—is not only a common one taking place all across the American landscape; it is also shaped by the vastness of our built environment and how Americans typically move through it.
An estimated 68% of Americans, or 108 million people, drive to and from work alone. The average distance is 21 miles and the average time is 26 minutes, while 27% of all commutes are more than a half hour each way. Spotify, one of America’s most popular podcast streaming service, claims that “without the distraction of screens,” a quarter of its 32.5 million podcast streamers primarily listen in the car.
According to Spotify, of the top 10 podcasts in the U.S., four regularly include a celebrity guest (or even more, as their hosts increasingly become celebrities in their own right). Whether it’s “The Joe Rogan Experience,” “The Tucker Carlson Show” or “Where Everybody Knows Your Name,” tens of millions of Americans, many presumably sitting alone in their cars for an hour or more, regularly depend on podcasts with familiar voices to keep them company.
Podcast proselytizers will tell you this behavior is new, but we’ve been using media and celebrity culture to escape social isolation and boredom for centuries. In 19th century Europe, shortly after the first railways were laid down between cities, growing populations were quickly transforming neighbors into strangers.
“Whenever, in the past, one knew that one was going to pass several hours, sometimes several days, in the company of others, one tried to establish a rapport with one’s companions that often lasted beyond the duration of the journey,” an anonymous contributor to the French medical congress wrote in 1866. “Today we no longer think about anything but the impatiently awaited and soon reached destination.”
Unburdened from the pressure to mingle with fellow passengers, yet still in search of a cure for boredom, many travelers turned to the written word for voluntary isolation; a momentary private world of their own as they hurtled through space in mixed company. “The emergence of the habit of reading while traveling was not only a result of the dissolution and panoramization of the outside landscape due to velocity, but also a result of the situation inside the train compartment,” the historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch wrote in “The Railway Journey.” “The railroad disrupted the travelers’ relationships to each other as it disrupted their relationship to the traversed landscape.”
It is almost ironic that, as a means of escape from society, the newfound popularity of print media gave birth to the “society page”: a section of the newspaper devoted to the rich and famous who managed to escape from society by supposedly rising above it. While the average person showed disinterest in the average person, the lives of celebrities were poured over as either models of aspiration or subjects of ridicule. Sociologist Agnes Gottlieb wrote in the “Encyclopedia of American Journalism” that “from the onset of society reporting in 1840, stories about the comings and goings of men and women of high social status have been a favorite among readers—including those who were being written about and those who only aspired to achieve such stature.” Unlike news of political or economic events, which were often skimmed for information pertinent to the reader, the pleasure of the society page was in its most intimate details, especially those on the verge of insignificance. What jewelry did the famous opera singer wear as they attended the big charity event? What did the playwright say to the surgeon that made him laugh? Why did the President’s daughter show up an hour late?

The society page found even greater success in the U.S., where celebrity culture was fueled by a popular addiction to entertainment. The average American of the early 1900s worked long, grueling hours, and preferred to fill their time between shifts, according to historian Neal Gabler’s “Life: The Movie,” with “gratification rather than edification, indulgence rather than transcendence, and reaction rather than contemplation.” Electronic media, which was quickly transforming celebrity culture into an industry, moved at a pace that the society page could hardly keep up with. Movies, first made public in the late 1890s, gave way to movie fan magazines in the 1910s, which, historian Karen Sternheimer wrote in “Celebrity Culture and the American Dream,” “served as advertising copy, first for the movies and eventually for their stars.”
In their chronic isolation from one another, Americans saw (and continue to see) the intimate details of celebrity lives as an opportunity to consider how best to manage the impressions they give off in public, and even interpret their own private thoughts. “Part of the allure of hearing about celebrities’ private lives,” wrote Sternheimer, “is it gives us a glimpse of ‘backstage,’ even if these revelations are carefully planned and edited for our consumption. Magazines that show celebrities’ physical imperfections—a bit of cellulite, a wrinkle, or a frumpy outfit—provide the thrill of seeing them ‘backstage,’ as do shots of stars without makeup.”
The love for lurid details of celebrity lifestyles among Americans was only matched by their love for space. According to Schivelbusch, while the railroad shortened the travel time between European cities, “in America, the railroad served to open up, for the first time, vast regions of previously unsettled wilderness.” The expansion of the American frontier in the late 1800s enabled the placement of cities far away from one another. The arrival of automobiles in the early 1900s enabled its population to zip around without ever having to breathe the same air as another human being.
The car-centric roads and highways that sprang up all across the U.S., however, were not only “scars that cut across mountains and plains, across cities and suburbs, poisoning the landscape and townscape with festering sores along their edges,” the writer Peter Blake argued in God’s Own Junkyard. They also “form[ed] massive walls that mutilate our communities by chopping them up into disconnected bits and pieces.” Americans needed a heavy duty form of entertainment to combat the loneliness of life behind the windshield, as well as the banality of the environment visible through it.
The first car radios of the 1930s aired the early iterations of talk radio, which achieved a new level of popularity in the 1980s through celebrity interviews conducted by “shock jocks,” most notably Howard Stern and Don Imus, as well as relatively gentle dialoguers, such as Michael Jackson and Ira Glass. Unlike the condensed and often rehearsed sound bites common to late-night network talk shows, talk radio hosts spoke with celebrities for long periods of time on a wide range of subjects, encouraging them to lower their defenses, have a human conversation, and tease out the details of their lives. Listeners became flies on the wall, an audience held captive in their cars, and were hanging onto every word. The celebrity, who may have once appeared unapproachable, now seemed as down-to-earth and accessible as the people they knew best in life.
“Not only are celebrities the protagonists of our news, the subjects of our daily discourse and the repositories of our values,” wrote Gabler, “they have also embedded themselves so deeply in our consciousness that many individuals profess feeling closer to, and more passionate about, them than about our own primary relationships.”
In many cases, these parasocial relationships with celebrities offer listeners a fantasy of connection that is preferable by far to small talk with an acquaintance at a cocktail party. How many millions of people are currently at social events, keeping one eye on the conversation they have been thrust into, the other on the clock? How many are counting down the minutes until they can hop in the car and turn on a podcast featuring a conversation between socialites that is just as boring as the one they are longing to escape?
Shane Reiner-Roth has written about the built environment for Architectural Digest, Dezeen, The Los Angeles Times, KCET, and more, and manages the Instagram page @everyverything.