Can You Hear Me Now?

    As modern, educated, intelligent, sophisticated humans of the 21st Century, across the board we all possess certain skills. Ask 100 different people what those skills are and, to no one’s great surprise, you’ll probably get 100 different answers.

    One skill that will most likely appear on a good many of those lists is listening. Simple. Ordinary. Everyday listening. We all do it. Constantly. Everyday. To most everyone we meet.

    If you asked those same 100 people if they are good listeners, most would answer “yes.” But are they really? What constitutes good listening? Think back to that notable lyric from Simon & Garfunkel’s Sounds of Silence, “People hearing without listening.” That’s spot on. Many people hear, but how many actually listen? How many hear what they want to hear?

    Here’s a good example. Read a magazine article and you’ll come away with certain ideas and impressions of the points that the author was trying to make. Your confidence may be shattered when you go back and read the letters to the editor commenting on the article. Some will ardently agree. Some will vehemently disagree. Did these people read the same article?

    Of course in the 21st Century, you can get more immediate feedback. Read an article online. Or a tweet on X. Or watch something on YouTube, TikTok or Instagram and you’ll form an opinion on the content. Then go and read the comments on that posting. You won’t need any scientific studies to prove how differently people “hear” things. It’s as if they were “listening” to different speakers, saying different things.

    From the avalanche of media and information spewing forth today, viewpoints are in no short supply. Everyone’s a commentator. Everyone’s a content creator. Everyone’s an interviewer.

    But what makes a good interviewer? Unfortunately there are many robotic interviewers who sit down with a guest with a prepared list of questions and methodically execute that list regardless of the answers and input of the guest. A good interviewer carefully listens to the responses of the interviewee in order to discern the next question from the initial answer and actually create a conversation. Consistent with this approach is the interviewer’s ability to repress any innate desire to talk over the guest in a feeble attempt to elevate his own importance.

    When the guests are allowed to speak, the result is a much more complete explanation of the topic which better serves the audience and the interviewer as well.

    Today, podcasts dominate that space and from that corner of the world there are several who emerge as excellent interviewers who are adept at listening to their guests and drawing as much relevant information from them as possible as they generate the next question from the answer. There is also little doubt that you most likely will “listen” to those podcasters who will tell you what you want to “hear.” 

    Overall, according to Perplexity, the top five podcasters today are: Joe Rogan, Alexandra Cooper, Tucker Carlson, Mel Robbins and Logan Paul.

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“Judge a man by his questions rather than his answers.”

– Voltaire, French Enlightenment

writer, philosopher, satirist and historian